Precarity, Inequality, and the Problem of Agency in the Study of the Life Course

Although long neglected, the themes of inequality and the differentiating consequences of structurally organized constraints and opportunities for individuals have recently become a major theme of scholars in aging and life-course studies. Beyond the evidence of intracohort patterns of cumulative dis/advantage in health and resources, recent societal trends of increasing inequality have added another dimension of theoretical interest and practical urgency to these concerns. These trends have been noteworthy both for the dramatic increase and for their planetary breadth, affecting Asia and Europe as well as America. Both researchers and popular writers have observed the growing importance of the precariat, an emerging subpopulation with tenuous connection to the primary economy encompasses individuals of every age. At the same time, individual agency and related concepts such as “choice” and “decision-making” continue regularly to appear as featured terms in studies of life course and related fields. Such concepts accord a strong explanatory force to the individual, and continue to be widely accepted as unproblematic and legitimate. This article examines the relevance of these two domains of life-course scholarship in analyzing an urgent contemporary problem—struggles associated with the “transition to adulthood” and the situation of young adults. Young people confronting this transition have been the focus of both the celebration of agency and of the growing attention on inequality and adversity and its effects on vulnerable periods and key transitions in the life course. Their situation provides an opportunity to resolve some of the tensions between perspectives that emphasize agency and those that emphasize inequality.