Chaque parcours de vie d’une personne est synthèse de multiples déterminations, d’interactions et des actions de la personne elle-même. Aussi chaque récit d’un parcours de vie contient-il, sous forme narrative, des informations et des significations sur des niveaux très divers de réalité.Comment le sociologue doit-il s’y prendre pour recueillir des récits de vie — et auprès de quelles personnes — afin que chacun contribue à la compréhension de l’objet étudié ? Comment construire cet...

Between Generations concerns powerful memories that continue to shape the present, but in this case in almost all families throughout the world. What is it that parents pass down to their children? How can we understand the mixture of conscious and unconscious models, myths, and material inheritance that are intertwined in both family and individual life stories? These questions turn out to be unexpectedly complicated, and answering them has suggested how a life-story approach can...

Calling for a broader, new approach to social mobility research, Pathways to Social Class: A Qualitative Approach to Social Mobility moves beyond pure statistics to use qualitative techniques-such as life stories and family case studies-to examine more closely the dynamics of mobility and address more fundamental sociological questions.

For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s resulted in a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and western researchers. This book is a fascinating collection of life stories and family history interview material collected by the editors and two Russian gr...