ABSTRACT
It is a common view that today’s life course is more tightly scheduled and interlocked than in the past (Musgrove & Middleton 1981:42), and that there is more regulation of life according to specific age norms (Hareven 1982:15). Martin Kohli has used the term “chronologization” to describe the process by which the life course has become standardized across class, ethnic and gender boundaries (Kohli 1986:271-303). Kohli suggests that chronology has come to have a strong grip on the life course of individuals. A process can be observed by which the criteria of age come to structure society, and relations within it, as a self re-enforcing process, and whereby the pattern is reproduced in stronger form over time. However, data presented in the previous chapter suggest that the life course in its current form is specific to the circumstances of modern, industrial, capitalist, society. The argument, therefore, is that in industrial society in the last part of the twentieth century, age is becoming much more important in relation to people’s experience. It is becoming a criterion that more people use to interpret and understand their experience of society and to structure their own consciousness and action. It might also be suggested that it is not only age-based criteria through which the increased chronological structuration of contemporary life occurs, but that generation and cohort criteria have also become more socially salient.
