Danilo Bolano & Nicoletta Balbo – Università Bocconi di Milano
This session mobilizes a key concept of life course sociology: the notion of linked lives. Changes in one
person’s life course pathway may lead to changes in other people’s lives. We do not live in a vacuum,
but are embedded in a web of relationships which results in a relevant dependence of an individual’s
attitudes and behaviours from members of the same group or network. That is particularly relevant
for the individual’s most proximal network, that is the family.
Individual actions are the results of shifting circumstances stemming from changes in behaviors of
relevant others. The aim of the session will be to bring together evidence on how and at what extend
life events and conditions of the parents’ generation can have an impact on events and trajectories on
the children’s generation and vice versa. For example, parental job loss might have negative effects on
the development of children; health problems during the childhood might not only affect the
development of the child, but may easily become a source of distress for parental employment and
couple relationship, depending on how parents adjust to the health needs of their children. Similarly,
strong interdependencies and intergenerational relationships might exist among adult children and
their older parents and/or across three generations: for instance, the trade-off between working
time/labor force participation and the need of providing grandchildren care.
The strength of the links among family members likely depends on the context. Macro-structural
contexts and social policies set constraining or enabling opportunity structures for individual agency
that jointly shape life courses. Studies, both qualitative and quantitative, that explore the role of
welfare and society in shaping the interrelationship across generations are particularly welcome.
Given the focus of the SISEC2023 on the relevance of having a multi-disciplinary approach to the
study of social processes, the coordinators believe that life course being traditionally a non-dogmatic
approach, multi-disciplinary and multi-method in its essence is a relevant framework for the study of
« società che cambia »