Welfare States as Transition Regimes: Reconstruction from International Comparisons of Young People’s Transitions to Work

Abstract

International comparison of welfare states offers a way for understanding how welfare states have contributed to the constitution of life course transitions and the different ways in which they are being shaped. The chapter introduces the concept of “transition regimes”, a comparative model developed with regard to school-to-work-transitions. The aim is to question if and to what extent this model can contribute to the objectives of reflexive transition research that extends the research of how individual transitions progress to how they are constantly re-constituted. In detail, this implies relating the analysis of comprehensive constellations with the discursive, institutional and individual practices involved in doing transitions. The chapter starts with an overview of international studies of school-to-work-transitions. This is followed by a review of comparative welfare research and the introduction of the concept of transition regimes, which is then related to the concept of doing transitions. The conclusion explores the contribution of comparative analysis of transition regimes for reflexive transition research.

There is consensus that the institutionalization of the life course is related to the organization of modern societies as welfare states. In labor societies, the differentiation of age-specific roles centered around paid work resulted in standardization of what Kohli (1985) called the “tripartite” life course consisting of phases of pre-employment, employment and/or family work, and post-employment. The introduction of public education resulted in the creation of the “youth” phase as an educational moratorium to prepare the following generation for employment and life careers (cf. Zinnecker, 2000). With the development of modern welfare states and the introduction of pension schemes, “retirement” emerged as another distinct life phase, while social security secures employment careers and social services of people-processing and people-changing (Hasenfeld, 1983) make sure that individuals are willing and able to live “normal” lives (Böhnisch & Schröer, 2016).

If national welfare states are largely involved in the institutionalization of the life course and the transitions it includes, international comparisons of welfare states offer a way for the analysis aimed at understanding how welfare states have contributed to the constitution of life course transitions and the different ways in which they are being shaped (and still do). The chapter introduces the concept of “transition regimes,” a comparative model developed for analyzing school-to-work-transitions. The aim is to question if and to what extent this model can contribute to the objectives of reflexive transition research that extends the research of how individual transitions progress to how they are constantly re-constituted. In detail, this implies relating the analysis of comprehensive constellations with the discursive, institutional, and individual practices involved in doing transitions (see Chap. 1 by Walther, Stauber, and Settersten, this volume).

The chapter starts with a brief overview of the development of international studies of school-to-work-transitions. This is followed by a review of comparative welfare research and the introduction of the concept of transition regimes, which is then related to the concept of doing transitions. The conclusion explores the contribution of comparative analysis of transition regimes for reflexive transition research.

International (and) Comparative Research on Transitions into Training and Work

Young people’s transitions from school to work have been a focus of social research since the mid-1980s. The Fordist program of economic growth, progress and full employment of the postwar period was replaced by a partial decoupling of education and employment and structural unemployment resulting from globalization and greater flexibility in production and work (Mayer, 2004). Youth unemployment especially turned into a challenge for the “integration promise” of the welfare state (Böhnisch & Schröer, 2016, p. 4). This structural crisis was referred to in terms of a potential “end of work,” the “limits of welfare,” or the declining sovereignty of nation-states and the growing influence of international political actors like OECD and EU. “Transition research” (used as a term in Germany for the first time by Brock, 1991) developed both nationally and internationally with international comparisons serving as an evidence base for the competition between national economies (cf. Walther, 2017).

Due to their orientation towards social and labor market policies, many studies were oriented towards institutional and normative criteria of “success” versus “failure” (like work versus unemployment), which has contributed to a “methodological institutionalism” of transition research (Schröer, 2015, p. 934). Success and failure were explained by categories such as social background, ethnicity, and gender and interpreted partly as individual or structural factors of disadvantage, the performance of regional labor markets, and the ways transitions are shaped by social, educational and employment policies. Comparative studies addressed organizational versus occupational labor markets (Shavit & Müller, 1998) or more versus less stratified and standardized education and training (Allmendinger, 1989) as independent variables of (youth) unemployment. However, structures and logics of welfare affect the social composition and the duration of unemployment, whereas they have less influence on how many people become unemployed (cf. Blossfeld et al., 2005; Pohl & Walther, 2007).

Gradually, also qualitative research designs focusing on the subjective aspects of transitions to work were introduced. Biographical analysis, especially, permitted researchers to reconstruct the subjective meanings that young people ascribe to institutional and economic aspects of work, their interpretations of discontinuous transitions, their experiences of labor market policies as well as their individual coping strategies. This contributed to weakening methodological institutionalism, but it often implied a dualistic and oppositional conception of structure and agency suggesting that individual subjectivities are separated from rather than interactively related with institutional structures (e.g., Evans & Heinz, 1994; Heinz, 2000; Schoon & Silbereisen, 2009).

The studies of the European Group for Regional and International Social Research (EGRIS), which followed the political agenda of EU funding programs, aimed to reconstruct the interactions between institutional actors and young people. In country-based case studies, different actors’ perspectives were comparatively analysed through secondary analyses, document analyses, surveys, and expert and biographical interviews. Main themes were risks of exclusion as side effects of labor market policies through stigmatisation and the “cooling out” of occupational aspirations (Walther et al., 2002). Other studies dealt with the divergence and convergence of such measures towards the activating welfare state within the EU, characterized by a shift towards expecting more self-responsibility of individuals even in precarious situations and thus emphasizing the relationship of disadvantage, participation, and subjective motivation (Pohl & Walther, 2007; Walther et al., 2006) or the role of the family in coping with uncertain transitions (Biggart & Kovacheva, 2006). This perspective was also applied to transitions into parenthood, into political, social, and civic participation, and in the context of migration (Pohl et al., 2011). An international comparative perspective allowed researchers to distinguish between general (European) and context-specific (national) aspects and to deconstruct apparently self-evident assumptions of normality through “pendulating” between internal and external views.

The critique of the dominance of institutional indicators of success and failure implied questioning an isolated and individualized view of discontinuous transitions. Rather than attributing them to social or individual problems, they were interpreted in relation to the context of late modern societies: the interplay of economic flexibilization, the individualization and pluralization of life conditions – and the de-standardization of the life course (cf. Beck, 1992; Heinz, 1991; Mayer, 2004). Consequently, models limited to explaining transitions as depending on the organization of education and labor markets deemed no longer sufficient. Instead, it seemed more and more necessary to subject these entities used as independent variables in studying transitions to a comprehensive analysis of how different ways of shaping transitions in the life course have evolved historically.

From Welfare Regimes to Transition Regimes

One concept that fulfils the criterion of a comprehensive analysis of how individual lives are coordinated through labor market and state institutions is the concept of welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1990). This model compares levels of social security, access regulations, responsibilities between state, market and family, and the role of different actors, especially aristocracy, citizens, farmers, workers’ movement, the church and the state, in the historical development of welfare states. Esping-Andersen distinguished three types of welfare states: (1) a social democratic welfare regime in the Nordic countries with broad access on the basis of citizenship and a high level of benefits, (2) a liberal welfare regime in the Anglo-Saxon countries with a similar regulation of access but lower level of benefits (residual), and (3) a conservative welfare regime in continental Europe, where access to social security depends on employment and family status and level of benefits varies. This model has been criticized for its limitations and further developed, for example, with the addition of a familistic or sub-protective regime type for Southern Europe, the identification of mechanisms of doing gender and doing ethnicity (Ferrera, 2005; Gallie & Paugam, 2000; Pohl, 2015; Sainsbury, 1999, 2006), and the inclusion of social services (Lorenz, 2006). Nevertheless, this model still anchors comparative welfare studies because it conceptualizes welfare states as “modes of integration” (Schefold, 1996) or “programs of socialization” (Lessenich, 2013: 895). This applies even more if, following Anglo-Saxon or Nordic traditions, education is interpreted as an integral element of welfare due its role in allocating occupational and social positions (cf. Allmendinger & Leibfried, 2003).

Such a comprehensive understanding of welfare justifies reference to the notion of a “regime” (Walther, 2017). In political science, the concept of regime refers to constellations of principles, norms, rules, and procedures operating without sanctions, such as the notion of “governance without government” in international relations (Mayer et al., 1993, p. 391). A similar understanding of interdependencies of labor market, welfare and education that transgress regulation through the state can be found in Mayer’s (1997) “political economy of the life course.” A second strand of perspectives connected to the regime concept are theories of power derived from Gramsci’s (1971) concept of “hegemony.” The relationship between a life course institutionalized through welfare and shared representations of “normal life” contributes to a powerful complex of values, norms, and practices (cf. Lessenich, 2013). According to Link (2006), “normality” is constituted by the relationship of power and knowledge of how “most others” live and thus informs social control and the coordination of social action. Normalization consequently results from the interplay between discourse, welfare state regulation and individuals’ everyday life practices. These reflections may explain why Esping-Andersen (1990) compared welfare regimes rather than “states” and why Kohli (1985) referred to a life course regime.

The concept of regime opens the view for the question how processes of social reproduction are being shaped – for example, how different welfare states or different institutional ways of regulating transitions reflect specific representations of family, individual, work, youth, or disadvantage (cf. Pfau-Effinger, 2005; Walther, 2017). The regime model implies an idea of social reproduction as the interplay between various actors and dimensions from which different normalities of the life course and transitions emerge (see Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1

Dimensions of welfare regimes. (Source: Walther, 2017, p. 289)

Comparative research is concerned with “relating relations” (Schriewer, 2000, p. 495). In transition research, this does not only apply to the relations between institutional structures and individual trajectories but also to the ways that transition structures and their underlying rationalities have changed. Thus, the regime concept can be applied to distinguish different “ideal types” of shaping transitions. While Esping-Andersen (1990) focused on access and levels of social security, the studies carried out by the EGRIS group (see above) aimed to elaborate regimes of school-to-work-transitions. This implied to include also other dimensions such as levels of public expenditure for education, labor market policies, and family, children and youth, degrees of selectivity and standardization of education and training (Allmendinger, 1989) as well as the aims and contents of schemes for disadvantaged and unemployed young people. In a next step, analyzing the differences between schemes for adults and for young people, especially by document analysis and expert interviews, allowed to reconstruct inherent cultural meanings and interpretations of “disadvantage” (individual versus structural) and representations of and expectations towards “youth.” Figure 3.2 shows the development from welfare regimes to life course and transition regimes suggesting that also the ways in which other transitions in the life course are shaped and constructed may be referred to in terms of transition regimes. While there are analogies between life course regimes as developed by other authors (see for example Mayer, 2004) regarding the relevance of welfare, education and labor market structures, the transition regime concepts pay more attention to cultural patterns and to biographical agency.

Fig. 3.2

Dimensions of transition regimes. (Source: Walther, 2017, p. 294)

In the research undertaken in the studies of the EGRIS network cited above four clusters of ideal-typical constellations of shaping transitions involving institutional, cultural-discursive, and biographical dimension were elaborated. In the following, these transition regimes will be briefly presented focusing on dominant representations and normalities of transitions from youth to adulthood (Walther, 2006, 2017):

• The liberal transition regime (e.g., UK, Ireland) is characterized by active labor market policies exerting control and sanction and reflecting the traditional expectation towards youth to become economically independent as soon as possible. However, the flexibilization of education and training has contributed to protracting and diversifying transition routes.

• In the universalistic transition regime (e.g., Denmark, Sweden) a comprehensive education system, individual and universal access to social security, options for choice also regarding forms of institutional support schemes express the recognition and securing of growing up as a process of personal development and an element of the citizenship status.

• The employment-centered transition regime (e.g., Germany, France) is marked by the combination of selective school, standardized vocational training and segmented social security. Young people are first expected to qualify for and be allocated to occupational positions of unequal status.

• The constitutive element of the under-institutionalized transition regime (e.g., Italy, Spain) is the lack of reliable institutionalized pathways from school to work and of entitlements to social security in the transition phase. Young people for a long time depend on their families reflecting an institutional “status vacuum” of youth and transitions in these contexts.

The analytical dimensions of the model have also been applied to Central and Eastern European countries. However, due to the dynamics, the complexity and the diversity of transformation processes, these systems were neither subsumed to existing regime types nor additional ones were created (cf. Pohl & Walther, 2007). Another societal trend that has been taken into consideration has been the trend towards activation as a new welfare paradigm. The simultaneity of path dependency and transnational convergence reflects that activation has become a general reference for policy reforms which, however, need to start from existing institutional structures and normalities (cf. Pohl & Walther, 2007; cf. Serrano Pascual, 2004). A further challenge was integrating a biographical perspective into the model. Asking young people for experiences of support by the state, generated ambivalent responses both in Germany and the UK, where those with discontinuous transitions necessarily come in contact with state institutions, in terms of “Yes, but …” – too little, hardly effective, implying humiliating conditions, and without options for choice. Young people in Southern and Eastern Europe mostly negated this question – like in Denmark, yet with different connotations: “What state?” respectively “We’re alone, if you have family or friends, ok …” in Bulgaria or Italy. while young Danes did not give any further explanations. In fact, they referred to educational allowances paid by the state, independent from parental income and not repayable, as well as easy access to counselling in all instances from school to labor market policies not as support but as a right and thus as normal (Walther, 2017, p. 294).

Even if the strength of the model is more the focus on the ways in which transitions are shaped compared to how they evolve, relationships between regime types and life conditions of young adults can be identified, especially where they are directly influenced by welfare institutions like for example the level of education and training of young adults, the duration of unemployment or the income situation of young people (Eurobarometer, 2007; Pohl & Walther, 2007). Yet, the potential of the model to forecast overall development of unemployment as well as how life trajectories evolve is limited which has been criticized as a weakness (cf. Raffe, 2014).

However, the reception of “transition regimes” in international research reflects the usefulness and plausibility of a heuristic model that clusters how transitions are structured in correspondence with welfare states. Soler-i-Martí and Ferrer-Fons (2015) have used the regime model to elaborate different degrees of the centrality of youth in different welfare states. Chevalier (2016) extended the model by a cross-cutting dimension of individualization versus familialization.

Transition Regimes as Constellations of Doing Transitions

Transition and welfare regimes are “ideal typical configurations [of] ... “modes of integration”” (Schefold, 1996, p. 96) and help to understand the emergence and permanence of normalities according to which processes of social integration in different contexts occur and are legitimized differently (Walther, 2017). The regime concept provides a comprehensive view on how cultural, institutional, and biographical dimensions and processes of shaping transitions in the life course are interrelated, interdependent and thus contribute to the emergence of an integrated social context in which transitions emerge and evolve. The doing transitions concept, instead, takes a closer look into these interrelations and interdependencies, especially in terms of discursive, institutional, and individual practice, in order to show that and how transitions do not simply exist but are constantly shaped and constructed in complex interactions of multiple actors and factors (see Chap. 1 by Walther, Stauber, & Settersten, this volume). The following section addresses the extent to which the two concepts are compatible and complementary in providing useful lenses to understand how transitions in the life course are being done. For reasons of simplification, one might refer to doing transitions as zooming in and to transition regimes as zooming out or as a constellation of several practices interacting in the constitution of life course transitions.

Institutional Regulation, Organization and Ritualization of Transitions

In labor societies, transitions to work represent the primary gateway to social inclusion. Access to possibilities of gaining competence and qualifications ensuring labor market entry are regulated by institutions. In comparative analysis, such institutions play a central role because they mitigate the integration of individuals into social structures. In the development of the model of transition regimes, descriptions and analyses of institutional structures therefore served as a foundation: access to school, training, and social security, goals and designs of schemes for disadvantaged youth, and entry to employment (see above). Even though it represents only part of institutional regulations, state-regulated access can be interpreted as the institutional regulation of transitions par excellence in modern societies. State-related access relies on universal rights and responsibilities, has sanctioning power, and reflects a social context institutionalized as nation-state and related concepts of citizenship.

Berger and Luckmann (1966) define institutions as comprehensive constellations of expectations and as “habitualized actions, that are ... typified reciprocally by actors. Each typification performed in this way is an institution” (ibid., 1969, p. 58). Such a perspective differs from the structural functionalist interpretation of institutions as structures established to stabilize the process of social integration as social “facts” (cf. Parsons & Smelser, 1956). Neo-institutionalist scholars, like Meyer and Rowan (1977), focus more on processes of (de)institutionalization resulting from experience, routine, and usefulness in confronting social context than on stable structures and their functionality for exerting existing norms. Institutions are contingent but persist if they are not questioned in everyday life and have power through their self-evidence and normality. This is close to how practice theories conceptualize institutions: as routinized practice (Giddens, 1984) perpetuated across time and space, and as “knowledge which has been once conveyed and incorporated [and] tends to be applied by actors again and again and to generate repetitive patterns of practice” (Reckwitz, 2003, p. 294).

The institutionalization of the life course and the emergence of the youth phase have for a long time been interpreted from a structural functionalist perspective as an educational moratorium serving to organize the reproduction of an existing order of division of labor across generational change. At the same time, “youth” has become a distinct life phase only through its cultural appropriation by young people themselves and their youth cultural practice (cf. Turner, 1969). From a practice theoretical perspective, the historical distinction of youth from childhood and adulthood appears as the perpetuation of a practice that has proved suitable for different actors in particular socio-historical contexts.

Following a processual understanding of institutions, doing transitions may be operationalized into three forms of institutionalization: regulation, ritualization, and organization. Regulation refers to the establishment and exertion of shared norms. Rules mark requirements for and the timing of transitions (such as stage, status, or competencies), fixed schedules and procedures of transitions secure preparation (especially conveying of necessary skills and knowledge and their assessment), the recognition that a transition has been completed and are controlled by gatekeepers (cf. Glaser & Strauss, 1971). Ritualization refers to practices of regulation that rely on traditional knowledge with a high symbolic potential. Anthropological studies of initiation rites or rites of passage (esp. Eisenstadt, 1956; Turner, 1969; van Gennep, 1977) analyzed how rituals enabled separation from the status of childhood, created the liminal phase in which initiates were separated from society and prepared for their new position, and finally incorporated into their new status as adults. Rituals share the function of perpetuating marks and rules, procedures, and schedules with particular organizations. Although rituals are often attributed to regulation of transitions in traditional societies, and organizations are associated with the functional differentiation of modern societies, this distinction neglects the blurred boundaries between traditional and modern societies and the persistence and constant re-emergence of rituals. Meyer and Rowan (1977) interpret organizations as social bodies that are in constant interaction with their societal environment and criticize dominant attributes of efficacy as legitimate “myths.” From an ethno-psychoanalytical perspective, Erdheim (1982, p. 327) questions the assumption that in “Western democratic and capitalist there is no initiation at all” and the categoric distinction of ritualized and organized transitions: “The young person has to attend school, undergo training, serve in the army … It is the difficulty of the subject that makes the length of the preparation” (see also Heinrich, Klevermann and Schmidt-Herta, Chap. 6, this volume; Riach, Chap. 7, this volume).

The institutional regulation of transitions ensures and legitimizes that those who endorse new positions have the necessary skills and knowledge and exhibit “normal” conduct – which therefore involves pedagogical moments (Hof et al., 2014). This applies not only to explicit educational institutions like school but also to institution like pension, where the welfare state creates incentives to build lives of gainful employment and thus “educates” people to lead their lives according (cf. Lessenich, 2012).

Institutional regulation is embodied by gatekeepers who coordinate and supervise procedures and schedules (cf. Heinz, 1992). In formally organized transitions, these are often representatives of pedagogical and social professions who assess the fit of individuals for new positions and apply clinical logics of “maturity” (like “employability,” Walther, 2015; cf. Stone, 1992). Following the insight that institutions need to be constantly articulated and reproduced, professionals have scopes of action that Lipsky (1980) has conceptualized as “street level bureaucracy”: institutional prescriptions must be interpreted, they can be ignored or even be undermined to maintain the functioning of the organization itself. There are also informal gatekeepers such as family members or peers who are actively involved in mediating the regulation of transitions, especially ritualized transitions (see Wanka and Prescher, Chap. 10, this volume).

Research on the effects of transitions on life trajectories often reduces institutions to independent variables (like company- versus school-based vocational training, cf. Shavit & Müller, 1998). From a neo-institutionalist perspective, the institutional regulations of transitions is contingent, even if power relationships and mechanisms of path dependency provide them considerable stability, and they cannot be separated from individuals using and moving through them. This perspective is fruitful for the concept of transition regimes for at least three reasons. First, it reveals why the institutional perspective is central in international comparative analysis. Second, it allows the analysis of both rituals and organizations as forms of perpetuating transitions. Third, it introduces a processual perspective regarding the (de)institutionalization of transitions and thus into their constitution through practices of regulation.

Normality of Transitions Through Discursive Practices

Existing empirical analyses of policies addressing youth unemployment have already revealed the relevance of cultural patterns for different forms of institutional regulation of transitions, for example different ascriptions of “disadvantage” and representations of “youth” (Walther, 2006; cf. Pfau-Effinger, 2005). “Governance beyond government” becomes hegemonial only if regulation by state institutions is linked with other modes of shaping transitions and if these figurations gain acceptance and become “normal”. Consequently, welfare and transition regimes can be understood as constellations of normality and normalization against the backdrop of widely accepted life plans and expected life trajectories (see also Boll, Chap. 11, this volume).

Leaning on Foucault’s discourse theory, social reproduction occurs in “fields of the normal,” of what can be said and seen (Link, 2006, p. 51). Such fields of the normal are integrated by typifying knowledge to which all actors involved refer and which emerges from the amalgam of institutionalized special discourses (e.g., science) and basic discourses embedded in everyday life. However, discursive orders only become powerful in structuring social reality where they are articulated in social practice. Discursive practices are acts of speech that refer to and reproduce a specific order of knowledge and meaning (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014), like the different legitimacy of the claims and demands on individuals in different welfare regimes.

Discourses are involved in the marking of so-called normative transitions which – like entering school or employment – are not negotiable without risking exclusion from the normal field of the life course. Thus, discourses are involved in the reproduction of normalities and normativities reflected in judgments about the “success” or “failure” of transitions – and therefore in the implicit and explicit educational goals of institutions as they prepare individuals for transitions. Finally, discourses are manifest in institutional procedures and schedules because they inform gatekeepers about the legitimate and normal ways to perform transitions, the adequate professional standards for supporting them, and the justification of necessary resources.

Link (2006, p. 51) refers to the discursive process of establishing normality as a knowledge order of typification. “Protonormalisms” are rigidly fixed institutionalized marks, while “flexible normalisms” refer to situational modifications in the interpretation and exertion of normality. Normalization, instead, refers to practices of adapting individual behavior to normality. Normality and normativity are complementary because norms influence what practices are held as ordinary and average whereas normal practices that have proved successful sooner or later become norms. Thus, normality secures a quasi-normative field of unquestioned and self-evident belonging, inclusion, and participation.

Coming back to the example of school-to-work-transitions, in the German speaking countries the combination of “protestant work ethic” (Weber, 1958), standardized vocational training, and state employment regulation have influenced both companies’ recruitment practices and people’s life planning according to a predominant view of work as “vocation.” Professional socialization not only requires certain skills but also subjection to a professional culture and identity (Walther, 2017). However, the motto “vocational training for all” (who are not entitled for access to higher education which applies to more than 50% of school leavers in Germany) has recently been questioned from three angles: First, since the 1990s, employers have withdrawn from the dual system of apprenticeship training, leading to a reduction of offered apprenticeships. Second, more young people, especially also among those with poor school qualifications, either prefer to stay in school and increase their qualifications (although opportunities to stay in the selective German school system are scarce) or accept precarious jobs to second-choice-training; also, because the “choice” not to accept training is often recognized as normal by parents and peers where options for choice are limited. Third, the trend towards the activating welfare state itself undermines vocationalism as job centers expect jobseekers to accept precarious jobs or schemes that do not lead to vocational qualifications (cf. Walther, 2015). International comparative analysis refers to discursive practices as cultural or “soft” factors, although they inform labor market structures, institutional regulation, everyday life ritualization, and – last but not least – individuals’ life plans. Thus, comparative analysis – not only between countries but also between historical periods or different transitions – helps identify distinct “rationalities of transitions” (Karl, 2014) that help integrate the complex interrelations through which transitions are being shaped.

Biography and Coping with Life as Subjectivation

Combining an international comparative analysis of transitions with a biographical perspective implies two challenges: first, biographies are (re)constructed to a limited degree as national; second, transition research has long addressed biographical and structural perspectives as dichotomy (cf. Walther, 2017). Analyzing interrelations of discursive, institutional, and individual modes of doing transitions therefore requires understanding biographical meaning not as property of individual actors in terms of subjective intentions but as evolving in processes of subjectivation. This leads to the question of whether the model of transition regimes is useful for a comparative analysis of transitions in terms of processes of subjectivation (see also Eberle, Lütgens, Pohling, Spies and Bauer, Chap. 9, this volume).

According to subjectivation theorists like Foucault (2005) and Butler (1997), individuals become agentic subjects through being addressed in the framework of what can be normally said and seen. The recognition individuals experience is never comprehensive or unconditional but is situationally and contextually bound to subjection to and enabling of specific subject positions – for example, as children, youth, adult, or old persons (cf. Ricken, 2013). However, positioning oneself toward and identifying with the norms involved in being addressed are not reproduced one-to-one but are contingent upon and open to variations in the process of reproduction (re-signification; Butler, 1997). Thus, subjectivation does not exclude the individual accumulation of biographical experience which, however, does not belong to a “strong” pre-existing subject but to a “subject of power (where ‘of’ connotes both ‘belonging to’ and ‘wielding’)” (Butler, 1997, p. 14). Identification with being addressed provides agency in a specific situation. This agency is limited by discursive normality to a particular scope but is at the same time contingent, also because social situations are characterized by complex, fragmented, and contradictory practices of addressing, which is also conditioned by previous experiences of addressation, recognition, and identification (Alheit & Dausien, 2002).

What in subject-oriented transition research has been conceptualized as biographical coping with transitions (see Walther, 2017), from a doing transition perspective may be interpreted as the permanent production of subjects in the interaction of addressation, recognition, and identification that is conditioned by unequal resources and possibilities. According to Böhnisch and Schröer (2016), coping with life is the constant reassurance of agency in dealing with concrete demands in the context of normality. Coping with life can be seen as a case of flexible normalism as individuals tend to “stretch” normality so that it can be achieved with the disposable resources and secure at least partial inclusion (to a milieu, a scene, or a community of practice; cf. Lave & Wenger, 1991). Also dropping out from education or rejecting second choice job perspectives can be seen as coping with life in the mode of normalization.

Addressing individuals as children, young people, adults, seniors, or as pupils, students, workers, parents or retired, indigenous or migrants – the list goes on – involves normative expectations in terms of stability or transformation (that is, normative transitions). “Addressing” is contextual. For example, Pfau-Effinger (2005) refers to different representations of the “individual” in predominantly protestant versus catholic societies. Therefore, the biographical perspective requires thinking in interrelations: educational or employment decisions are ascribed to individuals who are made accountable for their outcomes, even if resulting from powerful institutional demands, influenced by gatekeepers, lacking options for choice, and limited resources (cf. Walther et al., 2016). At the same time, processes of “cooling out,” the lowering of aspirations induced by selective access to education and training, cannot be reduced to institutional regulation and deficit-oriented guidance by professional gatekeepers. They remain incomplete if individuals do not make second-choice options their own choices, accepting that available status positions fit them best and are therefore what they “want” (cf. Goffman, 1962; Walther, 2015).

From a biographical perspective to the interrelation between discursive, institutional, and individual modes of shaping transitions, international comparative analysis framed by the concept of transition regimes may be understood as complementing Foucault’s program of a “history of the different forms of subjectivation” (Foucault, 2005, p. 269).

Conclusion

The question whether the concept of transition regimes contributes to the reconstructive analysis of doing transitions in the life course is bound to the analysis of the interrelation between discursive, institutional, and individual practices through which transitions are shaped and constructed. Apart from understanding institutions as contingent but path-dependent processes of institutionalization, this requires conceptualizing discourses as practices that not only frame but are productive and inherent to institutional regulation and individual coping with life. This includes practices of typification and addressing people “as ...” – for example according to age and its cultural ascriptions and social expectations. Young people are addressed as “youth,” or even “disadvantaged youth”; children are addressed as “still” being children and therefore dependent and vulnerable; adults are addressed as “already” responsible for their decisions, and older people as “still” productive or “already” demented. During transitions, such addressation turns into “no more” (e.g., young) but “not yet” (e.g., adult) and represents both transformation and inconsistent status. Thus, the life course represents a constant process of subjectivation consisting of phases during which individuals are addressed as members of an age group and periods in which they are addressed as being in transition. Put differently, the developmental process of ageing is structured by an institutionalized sequence of processes of addressation and identification.

Practices of addressation are always practices of recognition (and vice versa) forcing and empowering individuals to speak, act, and develop of concept of themselves “as ...” the things being called out (cf. Ricken, 2013). In this process, discursive, institutional (both organizational and ritualized), and subjective practices are intertwined in terms of addressation, recognition, and identification or appropriation. This is compatible with a governance perspective on social change and the restructuring of life course transitions, like the anticipation of transitions into school or work and the implementation of support mechanisms of young adults that neither result only from institutional nor from individual decision-making but from complex interactions (cf. Walther et al., 2016; Parreira do Amaral et al., 2019; see also Eberle et al., Chap. 9, this volume; Hirschfeld and Lenz, Chap. 4, this volume).

Finally, the contribution of transition regimes to reflexive transition research, and the concept of doing transitions, depends on its applicability to transitions other than young people’s transitions to work. It seems plausible to expect analogies between the constitution of different transitions within a comprehensive life course regime (Kohli, 1985) – which still need to be identified and analyzed empirically; for example, by questioning the extent to which there are analogies or mirror-inverted complementarities between transitions into and out of work. Are analogies or complementarities already visible in transitions to nursery or primary school? What about in transitions within adulthood such as job changes, unemployment, or family building? Referring to the German context, for example, this would imply an analysis of whether and how the combination of selective schooling, standardized training, and a normalizing organization of work as “vocation” is also reflected in structures of retirement or access to childcare. At the same time, studies on the activating welfare suggest that discourses of individualization, responsibilization, mobilization, and self-optimization increasingly address individuals in different ages (cf. Lessenich, 2013). Yet even if different transitions in the same societal context are shaped according to different rationales, the concept of transition regimes allows to analyze the different interplays between discursive, institutional, and individual logics regarding the social meaning and function of doing transitions differently within the same life course regime and its effects on life trajectories.

In sum, the concept of transition not only serves to organize international comparisons of how life course transitions are shaped and constructed but also provides a lens for the comprehensive interaction of different discursive, institutional, and individual practices involved in doing transitions.