| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 51

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Paul Anisef, Paul Axelrod, Etta Balchman-Anisef, Carl James, Anton Turrittin, Opportunity and Uncertainty: Life Course Experiences of the Class of '73 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

SOCIAL RESEARCH usually involves taking a snapshot at one time and in one place. The researchers who have written Opportunity and Uncertainty have taken several portraits of the same group, capturing this "Class of '73" at various stages of their life course, anticipating graduation, securing a first full-time job, and embarking on the personal project of child-rearing.	1
Reading about the Class of '73 is reminiscent of attending a class reunion. Not everyone comes to a reunion and it is often the more successful who show up. Similarly, a great deal of attrition occurred in the successive stages of the longitudinal study described in this book, despite the admirable efforts of the research team to trace and contact members of their group. The study was conducted through six phases beginning with 2,555 grade 12 students in 97 secondary schools in Ontario. Five successive follow-ups were done, culminating in 1995, when 30.8 per cent, or 788 from the initial group, returned surveys. While less than a third remained, the final snapshot is still broadly representative of the original graduating class, with some over representation of the more successful and highly educated, and those from rural and small-town Ontario.	2
Not everyone made it for the original class picture in 1973. Among the missing were the approximately 20 per cent who had dropped out prior to grade 12. They would have been least likely to be conventionally successful and most likely to disappear from successive stages of any study. Typical of studies of school attendees, the rich and powerful at the opposite end of the social spectrum were also conspicuously absent, though five of the respondents reported having more than 150 employees.	3
In between these extremes the study includes people from a very broad range of employment statuses and affords the researchers the opportunity to compare career and life-course patterns using a number of background and achievement variables. While this single cohort study does not directly allow cross-generational comparisons, it does provide a base from which the experience of other groups may be contrasted. As the authors note, the generation that matured in the 1990s faced a much more negatively structured job market relative to 1973, suggesting a direction for future research.	4
The majority of the findings reported consist of quantitative data from the various survey phases, though primarily from the last phase. Inevitably, individual respondents disappear in the reports of percentages and overall trends, which require the aggregation of large numbers of respondents to be meaningful. To compensate, the researchers adopted a multi-technique approach that included almost 200 individual interviews or focus group participants. What people mean when they answer questions on a survey is best discovered by asking them directly.	5
The authors utilize a life-course perspective. Members of a given cohort are likely to approximate an overall, normative set of transitions as they age together, from graduation to retirement. Theoretically, the authors attempt to straddle, if not overcome, the seemingly permanent dichotomy in social science between the structural and choice determinants of life outcomes. In their theoretical model, structure and agency are distinguished, though they mutually condition each other. In turn, these primary determinants affect the objective situation of the respondents as well as their subjective understandings. This complex of factors is further mediated by the "structured individualization" of the stages in the life course determined by age.	6
This model suggests a way to talk about the factors involved in the individual's construction of her or his life course. A given outcome for any individual is some function of these complex, interacting elements, that include individual choices within the range of alternatives they perceive to be available at many crucial transition points in their life. The model makes intuitive sense in terms of the ways the respondents apparently perceived their lives. It is a pragmatic use of the agency/structure dichotomy that raises a larger, theoretical question about the effect of this individuated action on the social structure as a whole. This is not addressed by the authors. The theoretical model in Opportunity and Uncertainty does not imply any macro claims or application to the social formation as a whole.	7
Structure persists over time, irrespective of the specific individuals who come to occupy the spaces. From the perspective of pure capitalism, who does what is immaterial. Reproducing capitalism has been compatible with a variety of social forms, including a formal mechanism for meritocracy. Once labour was free, the individualized labour market meant precisely that all those born with spoons of base metals were on their own to compete, to achieve or fail, to choose within the structured options determined by the stage of the division of labour. Capitalism created this degree of hyper-agency, or under-determinism. From the perspective of actually existing capitalism, this agency is hindered or accelerated by social structural factors such as gender, class position, and ethnicity.	8
As Opportunity and Uncertainty demonstrates, the educational, employment, and mobility experiences of the Class of '73 were significantly influenced by the structural side of the agency- structure duality. Class and location shaped the unequal use of institutional opportunities (primarily education) even while education, as an agency outlet, has a strong independent effect on individual location. This was especially true of the Class of '73 since they benefited from an exceptional expansion of formal education, opening opportunities and resources that the Class of '73 consistently utilized. Gender shaped the particular outcomes within broader occupational or educational categories (the choice of programme, the type of work within an occupational category), and also played a key subsequent role structuring family life.	9
One of the main strengths of the analysis in Opportunity and Uncertainty is the incorporation of an historical framework that depicts the changing groves that groups will predictably follow in the aggregate, or individuals will navigate in the construction of their individuated life courses. Structured factors are effective variously in time and space. The class of '73, as late baby boomers, imbibed the expectations of post-war prosperity with their infant formula, weathered the Cold War, and endured school in a period of unprecedented flexibility in curricula. They experienced more Opportunity than Uncertainty, though there were whispered hints of more limited futures, more underemployment than unemployment. The future was casting a long shadow backwards, especially for social science and teacher-training graduates.	10
Mobility patterns were, predictably, complex, though mobility is a difficult concept to operationalize. On the crudest scale, while overall the majority remained in their class of origin, the Class of '73 experienced slightly more negative than positive intergenerational social mobility, particularly among middle status occupational groups. (Table 5.1) When a nine- category system was utilized, the norm for the class was considerable upward mobility, though largely into adjacent or nearly adjacent categories. (Table 5.3)	11
Children of immigrant families tended to do better than the Canadian-born, particularly among men. This illustrates the importance of agency within the structure, as new Canadians entered the country for the presumed advantages of mobility and then negotiated their new environment to realize their aspirations. The Class of '73 claimed to find their greatest source of satisfaction in their family life — in children and marriage — more than in their work, though most were also subjectively "satisfied" with their employment.	12
These are merely samplers. There were not many surprising or unexpected findings in the data analysis (although family was subjectively less important for class members in rural and small town areas compared with metro Toronto). The importance of the study is in the details, in the potential for comparison with other cohorts at different times and places. The authors have access to a very rich and detailed data source presented in numerous tables with full discussions of the findings, broken down by numerous background variables. It is not a casual read. Baby boomers will be interested in the book because, characteristically, it is about them. It is, in addition, a landmark study that will be a reference point for researchers profiling future generations. To their credit from the point of view of the average reader, the authors restricted their statistical analysis to percentage tables.	13
The use of illustrative case interviews is another important strength of the narration. The interview data, by their nature, offer a more complex image of the way individuals negotiate the constraint/agency paradigm. Interviews breathe life into the figures, illustrating the structural tendencies, and highlighting variations. The point of the illustrative material is not that examples "confirm" aggregate tendencies, (193) but to show the "unique ways in which people manage social and political capital," demonstrated in five detailed biographies presented in the penultimate chapter. Every life is, in a sense, unique. As social science practitioners, the authors necessarily abstract from this overwhelming mass of data.	14
The Class of '73 may be quite familiar to working academics, many of whom are baby boomers approaching retirement. They are unlikely to know any of the people behind the pseudonyms, but they know people like them. More to the point, there are many they do not know. If aggregate data gives you a more objective view of the surrounding reality, interview data allows an appreciation of the life experiences of people you would otherwise never know. They are the class members who do not show up for the reunions.	15
Anthony Thomson Acadia University

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