Conclusion

This book contributes to the growing literature on economic insecurity (Western et al. 2012). This dynamic perspective on inequality provided many insights about the stability of positions within the social stratification. Furthermore, this line of research showed how institutional arrangements shape social mobility over the life course (Fritzell 1990; McManus and DiPrete 2000). Research on trigger events over the life course proved to be an especially fruitful approach to understanding the mechanisms through which institutions influence economic insecurity (DiPrete 2002). This literature identified job loss as one of the main causes of downward social mobility (Burkhauser and Duncan 1989; DiPrete and McManus 2000a; McKernan and Ratcliffe 2005, Brand 2015). However, despite obvious connections to life course research in this literature – and especially “life course regimes” (Mayer 1997, 2001) – scholars often analyzed trigger events independent of the life courses they occurred in. I argue that this omission limits the insights about economic insecurity that this approach can yield. Therefore, I proposed to extend the trigger events framework by embedding it into the sociology of the life course. In the present study, I analyzed the economic insecurity due to job loss and unemployment in the United States and Germany with special focus on group differences that follow from the life course perspective. In this concluding chapter, I first recapitulate the proposed enhancements of the trigger events approach. Second, I summarize key findings from the empirical analyses and show the extent to which the extended trigger events approach leads to new insights about economic insecurity. Finally, I discuss how my findings relate to debates about the increase in economic instability, the diffusion of risks, and welfare state policies directed at the unemployed that I sketched in the introductory chapter of this study.