Transitions between life phases have long been central to understanding the organization and experience of the whole life course in every society, capturing the attention of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. The significance of transitions in the life course is especially apparent in times of great social, economic, and political change and discord, as the changing environments disrupt or undermine life as it was understood, whether by individuals or whole populations.

It is common to think about transitions in relation to a larger life trajectory, or pathway, similar to that of a career. A trajectory is understood to be long in scope, charting the course of an individual’s experiences in specific life domains (e.g., work, family, education, health, housing) over time. The individual life course is composed of these multiple, interwoven trajectories. Trajectories are punctuated by a sequence of successive life events and transitions. Events and transitions refer to changes in an individual’s state (cf. Elder Jr., 1985). Events are usually conceptualized as relatively abrupt changes, transitions refer to longer processes that may include discrete events, involve anticipatory and adaptive processes, and are often tied to the acquisition or relinquishment of social roles. Because trajectories are interlocked, transitions in one domain can spill over to another (e.g., transitions in work can spill over to family, and vice versa).

Taking a long view of an individual’s life, transitions that occur early in life may matter for later life (e.g., early childbearing may restrict opportunities for higher education or work; completion of a college degree may bring cumulative benefits to lifetime career advancement and income). These points reveal an often-examined dimension of transitions – age, or timing. That is, the experience of transitions, and their causes and consequences, depend on their timing – whether transitions are experienced “on-time” or “off-time” (early or late) related to social or statistical norms, or even whether individuals run out of time in making a transition (as not making a transition can itself be a sort of transition).

Transitions are understood as moments in individual lives that create or reproduce social inequalities and risks of social exclusion. Therefore, institutional actors are concerned with supporting individuals in transitions. In modern societies, institutions of the welfare state especially have been concerned with connecting individual lives with the exigencies of the societal division of labor. On one hand, we might point to what has been described as the “tripartite” model of the life course (Kohli, 1985) – with education and training in the beginnning, work in the middle, and retirement and leisure at the end. This “institutionalized” and highly predictable model of the life course emerged in full force by the middle of the last century, especially for men’s lives, and rested on a complex overlay of social institutions and policies that were built around it. It also institutionalized a separation between paid and unpaid work and in this way established gendered life courses (Levy & Widmer, 2013; Saraceno, 2008). On the other hand, recent decades have led to the dissolution of the tripartite life course and, in its wake, to greater unpredictability, uncertainty, and insecurity, especially for the most disadvantaged members of societies and those with fewer provisions of welfare states (cf. Beck, 1992). Research has developed in close relation to such policies and paid less attention to theoretical reflections of transitions, while social institutions and policies have treated them as quasi-natural social facts, which has also influenced research (Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

There are cultural but historically changing scripts for how lives are supposed to be lived in any given society. People in them are socialized in ways that create “mental maps” of what Neugarten (1969) called the “normal, expectable life.” These maps are the backdrop for life transitions: How do people in a society see the stages of life? What transitions are supposed to occur in those stages, and what transitions mark movement out of one stage and into another? These maps affect how people perceive and evaluate themselves and others. They play important roles in decision-making processes, particularly in shaping the kinds of goals people set and pursue at various points in life and how they allocate their resources.

Obviously, life courses and the transitions that mark them are highly complex phenomena of social reproduction. Driven by institutional actors and policy makers concerned with mitigating related problems like social disadvantage and risks of exclusion, much past research has tried to reduce this complexity to better observe and measure the effects of transitions on individual life trajectories (cf. Schoon & Silbereisen, 2009; Shavit & Müller, 1998). Recently, however, several attempts have been made to readdress the complexity of life courses. For example, Bernardi et al. (2019) have presented a model, the so-called “life course cube,” aimed at doing justice to the complex interdependencies involved in how life courses evolve. Schoon and Lyons-Amos (2017) have developed a socio-ecological model of agency structuring education and employment transitions.

This volume introduces a new framework for understanding life transitions – what we call Doing Transitions. We draw on a praxeological perspective, to question, reconsider, and recast some traditional ways of viewing transitions. In being socially recognized and shared, the cultural scripts that guide or prescribe transitions are accompanied by rituals, ceremonies, rights and duties, and institutional procedures. This means that transitions do not simply exist but are constantly constituted by practices – or better, bundles of practices (see Schatzki, this volume). We hope to offer a more comprehensive picture and knowledge of life course transitions, crossing or extending the boundaries of age groups, life domains, and disciplines that so often segregate inquiry. The volume emerges from the work of a German PhD program established at the Universities of Frankfurt and Tübingen. This program is concerned with understanding how various forms of transitions in the life course are constituted through the practices that shape them. Here, the program’s approach and some of its findings are for the first time addressed for an international audience. This chapter introduces the Doing Transitions perspective and the volume.

We will start from a presentation of the concept and its foundational tenets that transitions are shaped and produced through social practices, and that transitions emerge and are constantly reproduced and transformed through the interrelation of discourses, institutional regulation (including formal and informal pedagogical intervention), as well as individual processes of learning, education, and coping. After describing what a Doing Transitions perspective entails, we provide a brief overview of the volume and its chapters, which are organized around three themes: institutions and organizations; times and normativities; and materialities, such as bodies, spaces, and artifacts.

“Doing Transitions”: The Concept

The widespread notion of “transition” refers to a movement or process of crossing a certain space from one defined point towards another, or “a change from one state to another” (Sackmann & Wingens, 2001, p. 42). This is consistent with the understanding of “transition” as a key concept in life course research. The life course is viewed as being punctuated by a series of normative age-related transitions, many of which are institutionalized, and individuals are expected to follow as they move across life phases (Elder Jr., 1985; Kohli, 1985).

Although there is a broad understanding of the life course as an institution, transitions simultaneously, and perhaps not surprising, tend to be interpreted as individual processes. The concept of “doing transitions,” in contrast, emphasizes that transitions are constituted within and through different types of social relationships and different modes and degrees of institutionalization. Consequently, transitions are not individual but relational. Take the transition from kindergarten to school as an example. One may be tempted to reduce this transition to the capacity of the child to take this process as self-evident – sooner or later all children go through it, at least in countries where educational systems start early. However, this interpretation neglects some critical points: First, it is only in modern societies that school has been made compulsory, and it is only in recent decades that education has been declared as the most central resource for a “successful life in a well-functioning society” (see the title of Rychen & Salganik, 2003). Second, the transition from kindergarten to school involves many actors, starting with parents (who are made accountable for this process both by society and state authorities), medical professionals and childcare or early learning providers, as well as the teachers who receive new cohorts of pupils into their schools and classrooms. Third, peers are crucial in this process, in that children are sensitive to the reactions and evaluations of their classmates and are, in front of one another, engaged in self-presentation as “school children.” Fourth, even referring to school entry as a transition from kindergarten to school reflects the fact that kindergarten attendance is an aspect and asset of modern childhood – and a consequence of growing rates of female employment when children are young and the need for childcare to make work possible alongside childrearing.

A Doing Transitions perspective, then, begs us to not see transitions as individual phenomena but instead as deeply interwoven with others, as suggested by the concept of “linked lives” (Elder Jr., 1994; Settersten Jr., 2015). Put simply, the life of one person affects and is affected by other people, especially the most central and intimate of relationships. In the spirit of this principle, transitions in the lives of one person can create transitions for others, not only in forcing adaptation, but in bringing formal changes – for example, when children become parents, parents become grandparents; when a couple divorces, the divorce creates “ex” relationships throughout the family matrix. Because family (or family-like) relationships are most central to everyday life, the family is generally the setting in which most transitions, whatever their content, are experienced and given meaning.

Moreover, life course transitions take place in multi-layered settings that affect their experience and transitions themselves may prompt a change in settings (e.g., starting university or a new job, moving to a new neighbourhood). They are intertwined with wider societal processes and embedded in specific social contexts. Transitions cannot be separated from how they are socially constructed, especially through discourses – a topic to which we will return.

It may seem obvious that transitions are processes, and yet they are too often measured as single events. Processes are not only involved in a change from state A to B. Multiple specific events may mark a transition, but the underlying transformative processes cover a longer arc of time starting earlier and lasting longer. This can best be illustrated through apparently “new” transitions like children’s transition from parental care into daycare, which precedes the transition illustrated above: This process has been referred to as a transition that needs to be fostered because women’s employment has increased and, as such, the entry of children into institutionalized daycare can be anticipated. Also, neuroscience and educational policy emphasize the importance of early childhood for lifelong learning careers, which also affects how women’s work or the placement of children into daycare are interpreted or justified. In the individual case, this transition may be envisioned or articulated from the start of pregnancy – even well before it, when individuals or couples may plan or envision family formation; or even before that, when they are seeking education or building careers and their decisions and negotiations may be related to the future timing of children – all the way up to parents’ deliberations about when they (and in most cases, the mother) should return to work.

The relational and processual structure of a transition’s constitution is central to a “doing” perspective. If we assume that transitions are not a given quasi-natural social fact (unlike the process of physical growth or maturation, which is viewed as natural), then transitions must instead be understood as being constantly (re-)produced. This conception of ‘doing” has been introduced by West and Zimmerman (1987), who analyze “doing gender” as “a routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment” (p. 126) “embedded in everyday interaction” (p. 125). They continue:

When we view gender as an accomplishment, an achieved property of situated conduct, our attention shifts from matters internal to the individual and focuses on interactional and, ultimately, institutional arenas. In one sense, of course, it is individuals who “do” gender. But it is a situated doing, carried out in the virtual or real presence of others who are presumed to be oriented to its production. Rather than as a property of individuals, we conceive of gender as an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society (p. 126).

This anti-essentialist view has been extended in terms of “doing difference” (Fenstermaker & West, 1995), and can be read as a version of an intersectional perspective, which had already been developed by black feminists in the 1970s. Doing difference implies understanding race, class, and other differences too as “ongoing interactional accomplishment” (p. 8). However, these accomplishments should not be misunderstood as merely situational but as:

… an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and a means of justifying [one of the most fundamental] divisions of society. We suggested that examining how [gender] is accomplished could reveal the mechanisms by which power is exercised and inequality is produced (p. 9).

If we generalize these considerations, “doing” is not understood as individual action but instead as an interactive or collective practice that not only involves individuals who are co-present but extends to institutional and discursive phenomena that affect those practices as they are enacted in specific social situations.

The concept of “doing gender” stimulates the concept of “doing transitions” in two ways. First, doing transitions emphasizes how social inequalities are (re-)produced during and through life transitions, and transitions themselves are also significantly gendered in their causes and consequences. Second, “doing” emphasizes the need for a constructivist conceptualization of transitions that includes attention to their performative and interpretative aspects.

Thus, a perspective using the prefix “doing” serves as a heuristic device for analyzing mechanisms of power and social inequalities, especially with regard to how they are being (re)produced (cf. Hirschauer, 2019). In applying “doing” to transitions we must therefore not view transitions as “neutral” social phenomena but as components of powerful social orders and their (re)production (cf. Stauber, 2020). In fact, transitions represent processes of “doing difference”: Inasmuch as transitions refer to the crossing of boundaries between social states, phases of life, ages, social positions, institutional roles, or statuses of membership, they contribute to their demarcation and reproduction. Thus, analyzing how transitions are being “done” allows us to analyze how powerful social boundaries are being reproduced – or modified. Rather than understanding power and inequality as determined, the emphasis of accomplishment and performance inherent to a “doing” perspective is meant as the smallest but fundamental unit of the social involving human actors as well as artifacts and discourses (cf. Latour, 2005; Shove et al., 2012). These theorists conceptualize social practice not as isolated or micro practices, but as bundles of practices that can achieve considerable persistence over time and space, such as the case of institutions (cf. Nicolini, 2009). The life course, and transitions in particular, can be conceptualized as bundles of practice (see also Schatzki, this volume).

Analyzing how transitions are being done implies differentiation between various practices or modes of “doing,” through which they are being shaped and formed. For reasons of operationalization, our research, conducted from a Doing Transitions perspective, thus far distinguishes three modes of constitution: discursive, institutional and individual practices.

Following Foucault (1972), discourses represent powerful orders of knowledge. These orders are “productive” in as much as they frame if and how social phenomena are named in a specific way. Thus, discourses not only represent structural orders but are also practical acts of distinction, address, and evaluation. Discourses “systematically form the objects of which they speak” (p. 54). They contribute to normality as a system of self-evidence of what can and cannot be said. Regarding transitions, this starts – most banally and most dangerously – when social states, positions, memberships, and changes between them, are formally or informally judged to be indicators of “success” or “failure.” In this regard, one might even problematize the increased reference to “transition” (instead of status passage) as a shift from a structural towards a more individualized perspective (cf. Walther et al., 2016).

The so-called “normal life course” is such a discursive phenomenon. It establishes situational definitions, interpretive frameworks, and symbolic orders that contribute to the constitution of transitions. In this discursive framework, requirements of age roles and judgments of success or failure are implicitly or explicitly individualized (cf. Rieger-Ladich, 2012). If we are to analyze how transitions are “done” through powerful discursive practice, we must question (1) practices of articulation (in what circumstances which processes and situations are referred to as “transitions”; cf. Hall, 1996), (2) practices of attribution (which requirements and which consequences, such as “age-conformity,” are attributed to it, especially as “success” or “failure”), (3) and practices of responsibilization (who is assigned as responsible for the outcomes of transitions; see Riach, this volume; Krumbügel, this volume).

If we take the example of school-to-work-transitions, young people are “called into” a powerful discourse (articulation) centered around the expectation of gainful employment as a basis of a “normal” life course. This discourse marks a process characterized by orientation, choice, decision-making, and training. Success and failure are clearly marked in terms of qualification, employment and unemployment, stability and precarity (attribution). In recent decades, young people have been construed to be responsible for planning their professional lives and therefore have been made individually accountable for their precarious position in the labor market and, consequently, in society – despite the fact that a broad range of factors are beyond their control, such as the availability and quality of training opportunities, labor market segmentation by gender or ethnicity, or health-related issues related to specific occupations (responsibilization). In the German context, the recent shift towards individualized responsibilization and attribution is reflected in the emergence of the concept “(lack of) trainability” (in fact, German “mangelnde Ausbildungsreife” means a deficit of “maturity” for training). Introduced by employers to justify reducing apprencticeships, government institutions have adopted this concept to refer to school-leavers who do not directly enter training – and whose individual deficits need to be compensated by pre-vocational education or training. This discourse has claimed goals related to trainability as the official objectives and measures of education, even at lower secondary school levels. As a result, professional orientation in school is now anticipated to start in seventh grade, in which students would generally not be older than age 14 (cf. Walther, 2015).

Institutions can be viewed as expressions of social discourses, playing roles in regulating and processing transitions. Broadly, institutions represent sets of expectations and routines, rules and requirements, markers, and procedures (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Giddens, 1984). They gain persistence through their historical development as complex bundles of practices, and at the same time they are contingent because they depend on constant re-articulation and reproduction. While this implies openness for change, the interdependence of institutionalized practices contributes to stability and path dependency (cf. North, 1990, see also Walther, this volume). Institutions regulate life transitions through three common practices: (1) marking the conditions, times, and duration of transitions, such as determining access to or membership in social categories like age (for compulsory schooling) or performance of knowledge and skill (for school completion, which also includes criteria like minimum duration of school attendance); (2) processing on the basis of pre-defined procedures for preparing, supervising, and assessing individuals during the transition (cf. Glaser & Strauss, 1971); and (3) gate-keeping as specific actors are assigned and responsible for guiding and supervising transitions (Heinz, 1992).

Entering and leaving school are examples of the institutional regulation of transitions through formal organization with legally codified markers, standardized procedures, and teachers as prototypes of professional gatekeepers. Other transitions are regulated less formally. For example, religious and secular “rites” that mark the passage between childhood and youth, or transitions like marriage, involve both legal and ritual forms of processing, even if the ritualized components of many transitions are diminished or optional. In fact, van Gennep’s (1960) classical analysis of “rites de passage” and his distinction of phases of separation, liminality, and incorporation to some degree reflect different institutional forms of regulating transitions (see also Wanka & Prescher, this volume). One of the demands inherent to the regulation of transitions is to ensure that individuals fulfil the expectations of the new position (Eisenstadt, 1956). Thus, transitions involve the acquisition and performance of knowledge and skills – learning – and their regulation includes formal or informal pedagogical practices that prepare, assess, and support individuals as they enter new positions. Special needs education or unemployment policies are practices of compensation where individuals do not meet transition requirements.

Practices of institutional regulation occur at different scales of aggregation. The construction of life transitions may be analyzed through the comparative analysis of labor markets, educational systems, and welfare states (cf. Heinz, 1991; Shavit & Müller, 1998; Mayer, 1997; see also Walther, this volume); through the analysis of organizational structures and practices of schools or welfare agencies (see also Riach, this volume; Heinrich, Klevermann & Schmidt-Hertha, this volume); or through professional practices aimed at preparing individuals for transitions to ensure the fit between requirements and competencies through pedagogical and social services (Walther, 2017). In addition, ritual practices involve different scales of community formation and performance – for example, a wedding may involve religious practices related to membership in a religious community but also practices limited to specific aspects of marriage, such as throwing rice (see also Wanka & Prescher, this volume).

Transitions are processes individuals experience and are subject to; but they are also actively negotiated with other actors regarding if, why and how those transitions are to occur. When transitions are institutionally prescribed, they are adopted, rejected, or modified against the backdrop of biographical patterns involving coping with everyday life, transformative learning, and practices of resistance (cf. Mezirow & Taylor, 2010; Nohl et al., 2014; Böhnisch & Schröer, 2016; see also Hirschfeld & Lenz, this volume; Eberle, Lütgens, Pohling, Spies & Bauer, this volume). Sometimes, transitions develop in a way that for individuals creates a discrepancy between one’s social position and the subjective experience of it – or even alienation from it (cf. Welzer, 1993) – leading the person to distance themselves from or relinquish the position. Examples in this respect are gender transitions (cf. Stryker, 2008) or separating from a partner one no longer feels affection for without being asked by anyone else to do so.

Practices ascribed to individuals therefore involve (1) positioning oneself towards expectations and being addressed in a specific way (as a child, or young person, or as being on the verge of adulthood); (2) learning, in acquiring skills and knowledge related to the new position as well as integrating the new position into the idea of the self; and (3) decision-making, as transitions in differentiated and individualized societies imply that there are choices to be made at crucial junctures that put individuals on different life trajectories.

However, transitions are often misconstrued as being individual experiences when they instead are intersubjective, co-produced, shared, dependent, conditioned, constrained or otherwise involve multiple actors (cf. Settersten Jr., 2015). Especially important are significant others with whom lives are intertwined and transitions are interlinked, gatekeepers concerned with “guiding” individuals through transitions, and objects that stimulate and direct individual agency (such as when job applicants complete forms and answer questions). As we described for school-to-work-transitions, individuals are confronted with demands that are discursively embedded in hegemonic models of the life course to which they must position themselves (cf. Thomae, 1996). Therefore, practices normally ascribed to individuals, such as learning or making decisions, must instead be understood as open-ended, dialectic social processes of “doing” and “being done,” of “being active” and “being subjected” (cf. Alkemeyer et al., 2013). These agentic processes represent practices of creating a “fit” between institutional and subjective modes of formation.

Modes of “doing transitions” cannot be isolated from each other. Indeed, they only can be distinguished from each other for analytical purposes. Discursive aspects cannot be reduced to “what is being said” but are inherent to any practice when they draw on, reproduce and/or transform knowledge orders. They are also inherent to spatial arrangements and artifacts (see below). These knowledge orders and their normativities are reflected in institutional regulation, and especially “chrono-normativities” (Riach et al., 2014) – that is, beliefs about what should be done at a specific age, and about the knowledge and skills that individuals need to perform new positions. “Individual” decision-making, coping, and learning must therefore be understood in the context of powerful discourses of “success” and “failure,” which are represented in and reinforced by institutional regulations. Regardless of whether individuals affirm or oppose the judgments of success and failure that result from institutional regulations, individuals nonetheless refer to them (Walther et al., 2016; cf. Rieger-Ladich, 2020).

The aspects of “doing transitions” described above enable us to view and analyze transitions beyond changes in social states. From this perspective, transitions refer to movements into new social situations and positions. Transitions express classifications (differentiating and addressing), fulfil the function of social allocation, distribute social goods (prestige, attention, access), and thus become socially momentous in having social consequences and affecting individuals’ life trajectories. Transitions are performative realities that are produced in discursive, institutional, and individual practices. There is a crucial relationship to be considered between the dynamics inherent to transitions and dynamics of social reproduction; and, transitions imply a latent potential of transformation. Consequently, reflexive transition research takes a processual perspective towards social realities and raises awareness for the constitution of transitions, including the research enterprise itself.

Cross-Cutting Themes in the Constitution of Transitions and Structure of the Book

The concept “doing transitions” relies on an understanding of transitions as relational – done through the interrelation of discursive articulation, institutional regulation, and agentic processes. How this interrelation looks with respect to a specific transition cannot be determined in advance, which is a primary reason why a Doing Transitions perspective represents a heuristic approach for empirical research. This perspective also demands that researchers be conscious of how research itself contributes to the social construction of transitions through its theories and methods.

The studies presented in this book analyse these interrelations and the “bridging points” between them. In bringing these practices and interrelations into focus, we are also able to better see other kinds of interdependencies – of domains, levels, and time – in the life course (Bernardi et al., 2019) and how transitions are integrated with processes of social structuration (cf. Giddens, 1984).

Theodore Schatzki (Chap. 2, this volume) introduces a practice-theoretical perspective with which the “doing transitions” concept is aligned. A phenomenological account of life trajectories provides the foundation for conceptualizing life trajectories not only as series of events but also as bundles of social practices bound to particular social contexts. Schatzki identifies three cross-cutting dimensions of life-trajectories: space-time paths, chains of actions, and past-future arcs. Schatzki also reflects on the advantages of using theories of practices in this context.

The subsequent chapters are organized by cross-cutting themes that have emerged as relevant in linking “doing transitions” with processes of social structuration: (1) institutions and organizations; (2) times and normativities; and (3) materialities, such as bodies, spaces, and artifacts. Below, we outline these dimensions and introduce the chapters.

We have introduced institutional regulation as one mode of “doing transitions.” In fact, institutions play a central role in understanding transitions because they contribute to the persistence of transitions as “social facts.” Anthropological studies have analyzed how rites of passage structure social reproduction (van Gennep, 1960), just as institutions such as labor markets, educational systems, or the policies and programs of welfare states often serve as causes or predictors of the effects that transitions have on individuals’ life trajectories (cf. Mayer, 1997). The latter have contributed to promoting paid work as the organizing feature of what Kohli (1985) called the “tripartite” life course, consisting of preparation for work in childhood and youth, productive (economic) and reproductive functions in adulthood, and retirement from work and continued consumption in old age.

The first part of the book starts with the chapter by Andreas Walther (Chap. 3, this volume), which argues that welfare and education must be viewed as key elements of transition “regimes,” as these offer quite different packages and therefore different conceptions of which transitions, and transition patterns are “normal” across countries. He emphasises that life courses and transitions are increasingly structured by access to, change between, and exit from education and welfare institutions – serving to reproduce and mitigate unequal social status positions. In practice, these processes of reproduction occur in organizations as an interactive negotiation between professional gatekeepers and individual “users” of these organizations, whether students, recipients of benefits, or clients of counselling. Heidi Hirschfeld and Bianca Lenz (Chap. 4, this volume) then focus on transitions to work and how institutional support measures are articulated in the ways young people make use of them. The chapter draws on findings from biographical analyses of two cases from two different German studies of school-to-work transitions, one on socio-pedagogical support for disadvantaged students in lower secondary school, the other on the combination of benefits and counselling in so-called youth job centers. The analyses reveal that how youth use support reflects their prior biographical experiences and affects how they make meaning and negotiate support during this juncture. At the opposite end of the educational opportunity continuum, Heinz-Hermann Krüger (Chap. 5, this volume) analyses the educational pathways of students in specialized and international elite high schools, which in the German context are rather exceptional. His findings from a longitudinal qualitative study show that privileged family backgrounds and mechanisms of institutional selectivity are not alone sufficient to reproduce higher social status and secure respective destinations but need to be complemented by individual biographical orientations.

Research on education and employment transitions often highlights high-level institutional regulations that affect access to and progression through the education system, the labor market or welfare entitlements. However, in modern societies many institutions are enacted by social organizations, which in turn must be understood as bundles of organizational practices. For example, local practice of educational systems is found in specific schools and the public authorities that oversee them, and local practice of labor markets is found in particular workplaces. It is good to remember that the companies in which many employment transitions take place have ultimate objectives to produce goods and services – they only implicitly act as gatekeepers in taking on individuals as employees or turning people into customers to meet these objectives. In fact, an “institutionalized” life course relies heavily on a network of organizations regulating individual life trajectories and gate-keeping opportunities. An organizational perspective reveals that “doing transitions” in and through organizations is not the simple result of top-down forces imposed on the individual but is instead negotiated and therefore potentially subject to constant modification by organizational routines and cultures, and by individual actors in interaction with other actors.

Eva Heinrich, Nils Klevermann and Bernhard Schmidt-Hertha (Chap. 6, this volume) analyze how organizations shape the transitions and subjective experience of collective actors. They are comparing the different cases of companies that organize female employees’ return to work after maternity leave and of migrant organizations expected to offer pathways to (active) citizenship of their members. They show how these processes contribute directly to how transitions are done for whole groups of workers or migrants. At the same time, their analysis reveals that organizations not only contribute to transitions of individual human actors but also undergo transitions themselves through which they are subjectivized as collective actors in the transition regime. This is where Kathleen Riach (Chap. 7, this volume) comes in, as she addresses transitions into “older workerhood” for aging employees in their workplaces. Workplaces are institutionalized by labor market dynamics, professional cultures, welfare regulations and organized by private companies or public services. Workplaces involve expectations and identification, as well as bodily performance reflecting norms of competitiveness. Ageing bodies, coupled with age-based ways of understanding transitions, lead workers to negotiate the lived experience of being in categories such as “fresh blood,” “prime worker,” and “older worker.”

The second part of the book is devoted to temporality and normativities. Most obviously, the lifespan represents a timeline in which transitions are emerging, are made necessary, and are institutionally regulated. Consequently, first, if transitions are understood as processes, they inherently involve time; timing is crucial to understand, as well as duration – how long a transition takes. But transitions can also be understood in bundles of practices, bringing questions about the significance of sequencing (the order in which they happen, such as partnership, marriage, and childbearing), spacing (how much time exists between transitions, such as those just mentioned or between multiple births), or density (how many changes occur within a bounded period, such as a year or two). Second, transitions are therefore expressed in a framework of time-related norms: expectations about when or in what order they are supposed to happen, how fast or slow they should be, or where they should lead and what will be judged a successful or failed outcome. In fact, the whole idea of the life course can be regarded as a normative ideal, with schedules that privilege some over others. These norms permeate the recognition of transitions through rituals and celebrations, and they also penalize those who cannot, for whatever reason, meet these expectations. And third, transitions emerge differently according to historical developments – they are historically situated. As a result, transitions must always be seen (although not fully or deterministically) as being the consequence to earlier transitions and as being the precursor of future transitions. In all these temporal aspects, normativity is implied: there are (historically shifting) normalities related to how to cope with and how to shape these life course transitions. With its notions of linearity and directedness, dominant conceptions of time itself also imply a kind of normativity.

This is the starting point of Núria Sánchez-Mira and Laura Bernardi (Chap. 8, this volume), who suggest a more comprehensive conceptualization of time – one that goes beyond an absolute (linear, chronological, uniform) understanding and instead emphasizes its relative nature. Drawing on insights from narrative and biographical research, relative time is revealed as multidirectional, elastic, and telescopic. However, even if this approach to time may be appropriate to transitions, it is nonetheless undermined by powerful practices that instead reinforce linearity and strict normalities. People are called into powerful discourses – and at the same time get the opportunity to depict their agency. This is then the focus of Noreen Eberle, Jessica Lütgens, Andrea Pohling, Tina Spies, and Petra Bauer (Chap. 9, this volume), who draw upon biographical narratives to examine discourses related to “normalities” (or “deviance”) in three different fields: in education, in political orientation, and in coping with experiences of sexual violence. They apply Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation (Hall, 1996) to identify three distinct modes of articulation in relation to their empirical material, and to discuss the possibilities of distancing oneself from or complying with societal expectations in these fields.

The next two chapters turn to the tension between normality and extraordinariness that characterizes some, but not all, “transitional events” in the life course. Anna Wanka and Julia Prescher (Chap. 10, this volume) propose that, whereas everyday mundane practices might be viewed as sites of repetition and routines that tend to reproduce social positions, transitional practices are marked by extraordinariness. The authors use empirical studies on transitions in youth and older age to explore the dynamic interplay between the mundane and the extraordinary in transition experiences. Tobias Boll (Chap. 11, this volume) systematically examines how life transitions are situated in terms of their “normality” or “deviance.” Even more, his chapter explores the idea of “doing transitions between categories,” bringing insights into the construction of what is regarded as normal or abnormal, for instance in the direction, timing, or mode of transitions.

The third part of the book focuses on materialities – such as space, bodies, and artifacts – in the constitution of transitions. Transitions are always situated in and cannot be separated from specific social spaces (see Schatzki, 2019). Even less can they be separated from the body – and may even go directly through the body, such as transitions in gender, health, pregnancy, and childbirth, or approaching death. Additionally, both spaces and bodies involve artifacts. The latter also become relevant in institutionalized contexts – for example, in the forms through which access is regulated and documented or how places are arranged to process transitions in particular ways. Spaces become stages or sets for transitions with thresholds, doors, walls, furnishings and decorations, public and private areas, and the like. Bodies are adorned with clothes and jewelry, work with instruments, swallow medicine; and even bodies themselves represent living materiality, most obvious in gender transitions, extreme body work (Ferreira, 2006), anti-ageing treatments, cosmetic surgeries, or other body modifications.

This trifecta of spaces, bodies, and artifacts is explored by Deborah Nägler and Anna Wanka (Chap. 12, this volume) in their treatment of materiality in social practice and its relevance for transitions. They illustrate these processes in two different phases of life, childhood and old age, opening a comprehensive and multi-layered view of the meaning of materiality and its relevance in the discussion of transitions. Their insights partly reinforce approaches of new materialism/post humanism, where artifacts become as important to creating social situations as human beings themselves. As with Bruno Latour, such artifacts are to be seen as actants with a certain potential of “doing transitions.” Janne Krumbügel (Chap. 13, this volume) picks up this issue, at first sight focusing on only one of these material dimensions: the body and, more specifically, the pregnant body. She analyzes pregnant bodies through the lens of the German pregnancy advice literature, thus bringing the dimension of artifacts back into the play. Such advice books, as artifacts, represent discursive practices through which processes of “re-naturalizing” the body can be made visible as a social process. While pregnancy is dealt with as a biological transition, these discourses give socially and historically contingent meaning to the pregnant body and its changes. Not surprisingly, these discourses are highly gendered, including concepts of medical risk, which form a specific normative notion of doing pregnancy the “right” way. Tabea Freutel-Funke and Helena Müller (Chap. 14, this volume) turn attention to the significance of spaces as contexts for transitions. However, they do not reduce space to the qualities of an outer environment but instead conceptualize it as a relational arrangement of people and spatial features. Based on two empirical studies grounded in dispositive analysis and environmental psychology, they examine the roles of space in two transitions: to independent mobility within neighborhoods in childhood and to multigenerational cohousing in older age. They ask: How and by whom is space made relevant in these transitions? How do spatial practices change with a change of environments? And how do spaces contribute to people’s everyday lives?

In the concluding chapter (Settersten, Stauber, & Walther, Chap. 15, this volume), we as editors integrate key theoretical, methodological, substantive themes that emerge in the chapters – not only identifying bridging and connecting points, but also building a set of overall lessons and contributions of a “doing transitions” perspective. We hope to bolster the relational framing of “doing transitions” by identifying, distinguishing, and outlining different patterns of relationships involved in the constitution of transitions in the life course. We show how a relational perspective is important to enlarge the understanding of life course transitions.

With this volume, we hope to stimulate debate and contribute to the development of reflexivity in research on life course transitions. Analyzing transitions in terms of doing includes reflecting how research itself is involved in the social practice through which transitions are being constituted.