Prof. Dr. Daniela Schiek
Research and Teaching Unit 2: Methods of Empirical Social Research
Social origin, the welfare state and individualisation: studies on the preconditions for life courses independent of parents
Schiek, Daniela/DFG (Heisenberg Programme)
Summary
However, the project is not limited to people of exclusively familial origins. Rather, the focus is on biographical structures that are largely built up without parents with the help of welfare state benefits (1).
At the other "extreme", life courses are considered that are organised almost exclusively within the family (2).
Overall, the relationship and mechanisms of autonomy of action constituted by the welfare state and the family will be analysed, which will also include a theoretical analysis (3).
Exploratory work will be carried out using the instruments of the narrative interview method, objective-hermeneutic case reconstruction and - especially for linking theory and empiricism - the formation of ideal types.
- "Home children": On the social mobility of (cultural) orphans
- "Fairground children": On the familial over-organisation of biographies
- The welfare state, socialisation and life courses independent of parents
Description of the project
Research on social mobility is currently largely focussed on the familial reproduction of life courses and the (influence of) parental origin. In contrast, this research project focuses on how life courses are individualised and how biographical orientations are constituted independently of (the class affiliation of) the parents. The search movement in this research project is therefore the search for autonomous action orientation as a biographical work and its enabling conditions - with a particular focus on welfare state conditions. This is because the welfare state is a decisive factor in the individualisation of the life course and the social placement to be organised by the individual in modern societies: its academic benefits bring about the individual planning and independent organisation of various phases, systems and roles and thus a specific culture of biographical action. This applies to all life courses. However, there are also constellations in which the regulation of the welfare state is "overemphasised" and its familial organisation is reduced. In extreme cases, this applies to orphans and children for whom the welfare state has taken over parenting as a substitute for other reasons. Conversely, there are also life courses whose family organisation is "overstretched" and which are hardly organised with the help of non-family milieus. This applies, for example, to (successions in) family businesses, with fairground businesses and funfairs in particular forming a market and life course regime organised almost exclusively by families.
The empirical field of social origins and social mobility will thus present itself as a continuum of - more or less - individualised orientations of action, with the extremes of parentless and welfare-stately organisedorientations on the one hand and biographical structures overemphasised by the family on the other. However, although these "extremes" are highly significant for the assertion, that it is primarily (academically educated and at least middle-class) families that impart knowledge that promotes advancement and biographical competences that promise success, biographical structures such as those that emerge without a family on the one hand or largely without a welfare state and public markets on the other have not yet been explored sociologically. The transitions, i.e. the finermore or less of familial or independent orientation, have also not yet been extensively analysed.
The project is therefore centred on the above-mentioned case studies, but these are open to further minimum and maximum comparative cases. Overall, the aim of the project is to explore the hitherto completely unexplored phenomena of parentless and over-organised family biographies and thus to significantly expand the theoretical field of (origin-specific) socialisation and the relationship between individualisation and the welfare state.
The research project is funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the Heisenberg Programme.