TRANSVERSAL • HORIZONTAL

2.2.1 Linear constructions of the life course based on objective markers

This thesis makes use of the life course as a sociological tool (Mayer, 2009; Elder et al, 2003). Since its conception during the interwar period of the twentieth century until the 1990s the life course was frequently considered in normative terms with specific emphasis on economic status and work and tended to focus on ‘predictable’ and linear passages of youth into adult life (Mayer & Müller 1986; Kohli, 1985). These linear life stages are often presented as the straightforward participation of individuals across education and training; entry into the labour market; growing up in families; partnership formations and parenthood; and regional mobility (Heinz and Marshall 2003). To this end life stages were often specific to age and were ‘produced’ by institutions and structural opportunities (Sheehy 1996; Sampson and Laub 1993; Kohli, 2007) and analysis has focused on the connection between individual lives and the historical and socio-economic context in which these lives unfold (Rydzewska and Pirrie, 2016). With respect to education, life course theory tended to

emphasise the transition from school to work as the primary transition

(Ecclestone, Biesta, and Hughes 2009) reiterating a linear teleological model of development that typically took the immature unemployable child as its starting point and positioned the independent employable adult as the `ultimate goal’ (Cohen and Ainley 2000:80). More recently, Chadderton and Colley (2012) show how young people’s transition from school-leavers to members of the labour market is still vaunted by policy-makers as the main policy objective and prime solution to social exclusion.

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With respect to autistic populations, a normative life course is emphasised in much of the current research literature with an unproblematic focus on transitions including primary to secondary education; compulsory schooling to employment; secondary education to higher education; child to adult service- user (Henninger and Lounds-Taylor, 2013; Seltzer et al., 2000). Such linear demarcations may be due to the identification by clinicians of developmental, and therefore normative, delays or impairments in social, cognitive or communicative functioning among autistic people. At a policy level across England and Wales, there is also clear evidence of the construction of transition for autistic according to a traditionally structured life course. The Autism Act

(2009), Think Autism (DWP, 2014) and more recent publications including,

Progress Report on Think Autism: the updated strategy for adults with autism in England (DWP, 2016) and Improving Lives: The Work, Health and Disability Green Paper (DWP, 2017), tend to treat transitions between life stages as necessarily normative by focussing on preparing children and young people for adulthood and employment. Some suggest that such application of a linear life course to autistic populations might be underpinned more by the desire among service providers, academics and policy-makers to design, implement, and evaluate structured programmes than how disabled individuals actually experience these transitions (Will, 1983; Kohler, 1996). By contrast, an individualised and differential life course offers a more sensitised means of considering the life course as an analytic tool among autistic populations.

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2.2.2 The ‘liquid’ life course of late modernity

By the 1990s a differential life course sociology emerged following a dramatic shift in global relations. Gallacher et al. (2009) cite globalisation, new technologies, science-based innovation, organisational restructuring, and the search for competitive advantage as precipitating such a sociological sea change. They refer to writers such as Giddens (1990), Beck (1992) and Bauman (2000) who emphasise a late modern shift towards heightened reflexivity, greater individualisation, and the interrogation of, heretofore, ‘objective’ demographic markers. Specifically, Bauman asserts that the ‘modern’ age would be better defined as ‘liquid’ where the liquidising powers have moved from the ‘system’ to ‘society’, from ‘politics’ to ‘life policies’ (Bauman, 2000:7). This process of ‘disembedding without re-embedding’ (Bauman and Tester, 2013: 89) results in new forms of personal alienation and community fragmentation where individuals experience ‘precariousness, instability, vulnerability [as] the most widespread (as well as the most painfully felt) features of contemporary life conditions’ (Bauman, 2000:160); a position that fits appositely with Beck’s (1992) construction of the ‘risk society’.

This analysis of society has implications for conceptions of young people and in particular transitions between life stages. Rather than seeing transition in terms of specific junctures that happen at assigned times throughout life, change is understood as a constant, whether it is experienced directly and personally or indirectly as part of the contexts of everyday life. According to Gallacher et al (2009:2) ‘transition is a fundamental feature of life in late modernity…each social

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routine or institution, every relationship and practice, is fluid and open to change; there are no fixed points on today’s social compass.’ Thus, society no longer determines transitional patterns throughout life, instead,

‘[e]verything, so to speak, is now down to the individual. It is up to the individual to find out what she or he is capable of doing, to stretch that capacity to the utmost, and to pick the ends to which that capacity could be applied best – that is, to the greatest conceivable satisfaction.’

(Bauman, 2000: 62)

This emphasis on individualisation among late modernists was instrumental in developing the notion of the 'choice biography’, where modern (young) people experience a much wider range of options from which to personally construct their life course and so determine their own transitions (Beck, 1992). As such ‘the normal biography’ becomes the ‘elective biography’, the ‘reflexive biography’, the ‘do-it-yourself biography’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2009:25). For autistic individuals, who frequently seek routine and sameness in order to bring structure to a chaotic world (Wing, 2000) it could be posited that such a precarious life course would be significantly more challenging.

Du Bois-Reymond (1998) was among the first to demonstrate the useful application of such choice biographies in her longitudinal study into post- adolescents’ life choices. Her participants presented high levels of flexibility and freedom with many leaving education ‘undecided’ about the future and prepared to defer their life’s goals until late into adulthood. Such findings concur with Arnett’s (2014) influential concept of ‘emerging adulthood’ where young people report enjoying a period of freedom and independence beyond adolescence before they commit themselves to adult responsibility. Both of these influential

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studies point towards an understanding of the life course that is elective and non-linear but also self-referential in nature.

Frequently young people’s outcomes, aspirations and expectations are only explicable on the basis of previous decisions, resources and experiences and rest on mutuality and interdependence with others (Ecclestone, Biesta, and Hughes, 2009). Valentine and Skelton (2007) cite examples of young people being dependent on their families for longer as evidence in this regard and there is certainly evidence that parents play a significant and sustained role in the lives of autistic young people (Seltzer et al; 2000; Strnadová and Evans, 2012; Morningstar et al., 1995). Thus, there is increasing acknowledgment that young people are not a universal category and that their transitions need to be understood within the diverse and ecological context of peers, family, communities (Jones, 2004; Osgood, 2005). Moreover, sociological evidence suggests that this phenomenon is particularly prevalent among young people in central and western European countries where mass education, welfare societies, secularization and political, cultural and sexual liberation mitigates some of the risks involved in such arrangements (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005).

That notwithstanding, it is important to note that whilst the late modern thesis has been recognised as offering a useful alternative lens through which to analyse the life course and transitions (Bynner, 2005; Worth, 2009; Ecclestone, Biesta, and Hughes 2009; inter alia), some find its claims of detraditonalization and reflexivity as overstated (Evans 2002; Brannen and Nilsen 2005). For example, Hörschelmann (2011) argues strongly that ethnocentric reappraisals of

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the term retain a misleading sense of historical order and cultural hierarchy and fail to acknowledge the extent to which ‘risk’ and unpredictability have been ever-present features of life in societies past and present. Moreover, Furlong (2009) argues that the mere existence of complexity does not necessarily result in the emergence of ‘choice biographies’, as du Bois Reymond (1998) and others suggest. By contrast they aver the opposite, that levels of complexity may in fact signify a lack of choice and a vulnerability to the adverse effects of flexible labour markets. Thus, it is clear that life course theory and transitions thereof continue to offer significant lines of intellectual discussion but remain conceptually and theoretically open to new constructions and applications.