| Mission of the programme Modernization of society has in the 20th century led to an increasing institutional in-terwovenness of the labor force, the social arrangements of the welfare state and of personal relationships on the micro level. This increased interwovenness has led to a certain degree of standardization of the life course and rigidity of social roles, such as found within typical male and female roles, career patterns, trajectories of joining and leaving the labor force, patterns of marriage and family formation and within education trajectories. Historically, these processes have formed the double-edged and ambivalent charac-ter of the modernization process, on the one hand opening up the potential of increased op-portunities and on the other hand enforcing in the sense of raising obstacles for growth and development. Together with the modernization of society two other processes of social change came about, which in short may be called a process of structural change and a process of increasing reflexivity. The process of structural change refers to the demographic shifts, globalization, production technology and expansion of the service industry, professionaliza-tion and bureaucratization of the care sector. The process of increasing reflexivity is not only concealed in the potential and need for steering of social change but also in the individual need for self-governing. In opposition against the structural forces of modernization a number of counter processes of emancipation, anti-discrimination and de-marginalization were initi- ated and eventually institutionalized, resulting in a strong movement of cultural politics and in processes of self-governing life course strategies. Organization of the programme The program is a merger of two research teams in 1999. The one fo- cussing on aging processes, social networks and autonomy of older people and the other studying labor force participation of women, related tensions between educational and caring obligations of these women and the working career in the context of the Dutch welfare state. The central themes of the new program are modernization, life course and aging, both on a macro and micro level. Phenomena such as modernization and aging processes ask for more in- depth analysis and clarification but also for studying the outcomes of these processes in people's lives. For example, it turns out that the recent strong increase in labor force participation of Dutch women leads to a disproportional influx of women in the public disability in-surance. To what extent are structural changes and increasing reflexivity processes related in this case? Examples of reflexivity processes among ethnic minority groups that are studied include, in particular, their coping strategies in work, family, peer group or neighborhood. Questions that arise include how does identity formation take place, and which mental problems go along with surviving in bi-cultural situations. Another example is the extent to which shifts in informal and formal care for dependent older people appear to be related to their well- being. Interesting questions in this case are to what extent changes in formal and informal care are related to modernization and to what extent experience of well-being is related to changing standards in connection with increasing reflexivity. The third focus of the program is the life course perspective. The objective of the pro-gram is to try to understand aging and modernization phenomena on the macro and micro level, from the position of institutionalized life course trajectories and individual life course events. The life course perspective includes chronology of processes and events, multidi-mensionality, social embeddedness and historical specificity in individual biographies and in-stitutionalized life course trajectories. This perspective opens up a broad approach for the analysis of macro and micro social phenomena and appears to be useful in the context of a number of different societal issues. |
