ABSTRACT
Life course developments are crucial for young people’s contemporary forms of civic engagement. Life courses are about discrete transitions in people’s lives, such as the transition from school to work, from childlessness to parenthood, from being excluded from voting to being able to vote. Life course regimes in advanced societies have changed fundamentally. During the late industrial or ‘Fordist-welfare state phase’ (from 1955 to around 1973), life courses became standardized: there was a male breadwinner, a nuclear family, and early marriage, and with standardized transitions from one stage to the next. There were distinct life phases of schooling (stable contract), employment, and retirement; with covered risks (sickness, disability, old age); a linear increase in wages and savings over the life course; and, from a subjective point of view, a life course orientation directed at progression and accumulation, and conformity to a (gendered) division of roles both in the public and private sphere (Mayer, 2001). Identities in this ideal type life course regime description were stable and well-defined or, perhaps better, one-dimensional (i.e., either private or public).
