Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation

Tavory, Iddo; Eliasoph, Nina

doi:10.1086/668646

Cited by 285 publications

(311 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Bandura (2001) highlights intentionality and forethought as two theoretically core aspects of human agency, yet they are rarely incorporated into sociological treatments (but see Hitlin and Elder, 2007b). Temporality is becoming increasingly important in sociological theorizing more generally, however (Mische 2009; Tavory and Eliasoph 2013). Individuals possess a sense of their ability to act successfully across the life course (Lutfey and Mortimer 2003) and form measurable intentions for future action (Howard 1994).…”

Section: Agency’s Missing Empirical Dimension: Perceptions Of the Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead

Hitlin

Johnson

2015

American Journal of Sociology

187

149

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Empirical treatments of agency have not caught up with theoretical explication; empirical projects almost always focus on concurrent beliefs about one’s ability to act successfully without sufficiently attending to temporality. We suggest that understanding the modern life course necessitates a multidimensional understanding of subjective agency involving a) perceived capacities and b) perceived life-chances, or expectations about what life holds in store. We also suggest that a proper understanding of agency’s potential power within a life course necessitates moving beyond the domain-specific expectations more typical of past sociological work. Utilizing the Youth Development Study (YDS), we employ a scale of general life expectations in adolescence to explore the potential influence of a general sense of optimistic life-expectations in addition to the traditional agency-as-efficacy approach on a range of important outcomes.

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Section: Agency’s Missing Empirical Dimension: Perceptions Of the Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead

Hitlin

Johnson

2015

American Journal of Sociology

187

149

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Taking a similar tack, the author of this chapter and others (Snyder 2016 ;Tavory 2016 ;Tavory and Eliasoph 2013 ;Trouille and Tavory frth ) have argued that in order to understand both actors and social worlds sociologists need to think inter-situationally. That is, not only within the situation, but in the predictable rhythms of situations that make up the social world.…”

Section: The Tricky Problem Of Culturementioning

confidence: 95%

Interactionism: Meaning and Self as Process

Tavory

2016

Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research

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“…The narratives people produce not only help them to identify courses of action, but also to understand their place within the institutions they inhabit and to coordinate future action (Tavory and Eliasoph 2013).…”

Section: Narrative Institutionalism and Narrative Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Failure in Emerging Adulthood: Narrative Agency in Career, Practice, and Care Institutions among Poor and Working Class Women

Nielsen¹

2016

Preprint

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Emerging adulthood is a period of high ambition and a high likelihood of failure. The process of managing failure in the transition to adulthood requires narrative work. Normative expectations for ambition make failure a cultural problem for emerging adults to solve. For poor and workingclass emerging adults, popular narratives of failure often pathologize them as youth-gone-bad or youth-gone-sad and undermine their ability to produce narratives of ambition. Nevertheless, they will respond to the pressure to tell an ambitious story. Drawing on four waves of life history interviews over a three-and-a-half year period with 23 poor and working-class emerging adult women, I show how they tell life stories using available institutional resources to narratively manage failure by responding to popular explanations for their failure and attempting to maintain claims to ambition. I distinguish between career, practice, and care institutions, which shape the possibilities for overcoming failure through narrative agency. This narrative institutionalism contributes to a better understanding of emerging adulthood and the cultural demands that poor and working-class youth must contend with over time. 2One period of life that is increasingly characterized by both ambition and failure is emerging adulthood (Waters et al. 2011). Scholars have identified several widely available explanations for failure among today's middle class 18-to 34-year-olds. They include lengthy periods of selfexploration (Smith 2009), economically-motivated returns to their parents' home (Newman 2012), and extended exposure to a higher education system that leaves graduates temporarily adrift and unprepared for independence (Arum and Roksa 2014; Clydesdale 2015). These "standard stories" (Tilly 1999) provide middle-class emerging adults with a normative framework to make sense of failure without minimizing their ambitious status; it is "helicopter parents" who have failed to let their children grow up, or the economic downturn that has cost the labor sector jobs, or a higher education system that has run amok-not the young adults boomeranging and drifting-who are to blame (Newman 2012). By contrast, poor and workingclass men and women who struggle to successfully enter adulthood encounter pathologizing narratives to explain their failure (Newman 1999b).As scholars have begun to examine more closely how today's 18-to 34-year-olds experience emerging adulthood, they have shown that coming-of-age experiences, and how young people interpret them often vary according to race, class, and gender. Whereas middle class millennials have access to standard stories of delayed ambition, poor and working-class young adults often adopt, respond to, and manage narratives of deviance, disability, and disorder when they account for their own and their peers' failure to achieve normative adulthood. These include stories of personal irresponsibility, criminal behavior, mental illness, and emotional trauma

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Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation

Cited by 285 publications

References 54 publications

Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead

Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead

Interactionism: Meaning and Self as Process

Failure in Emerging Adulthood: Narrative Agency in Career, Practice, and Care Institutions among Poor and Working Class Women

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