DIFFERENTIATION OF LIFE-COURSES - CHANGING PATTERNS OF LABOR-MARKET SEQUENCES IN WEST-GERMANY

Based on retrospective data from the 'Socio-Economic Panel' (SOEP), this paper deals with changes in the labour-force courses of West German men and women. Reformulating parts of the 'individualization thesis'-widely discussed in German sociology-in terms of observable (dis-)continuities in the life-course, it concentrates on sequences of positions inside and outside the active labour-force. Using indicators for stability and heterogeneity and a typology of gender-specific labour-force courses, we find extraordinarily high amounts of stability and low heterogeneity in the 1950s and 1960s. But in the 1970s, there was decreasing stability and increasing variation, especially for the younger men, which breaks the dominance of the 'normal male labour-force course'. The 1970s and 1980s seem to mark a new period of de-standardization and 'stabilization of instabilities' on the female side, too, because similar tendencies of less stability and more heterogeneity are found within the younger cohorts of women. But there is also a growing importance of continuous labour-market sequences amongst the younger women, perhaps leading to a sharper 'polarization' between family- and work-orientated life courses.