After nearly a half-century of employment at the University of Minnesota, LCC Member Jeylan T. Mortimer retired this year (1973-2021). To celebrate a great career here, Director Phyllis Moen asked Dr. Mortimer a few questions.
Moen: A life course approach focuses on context. What was the context around your founding of the Life Course Center?
Mortimer:
The Life Course Center was founded in the Department of Sociology in 1986. At that time, the Department was well known for its scholarship in family sociology, criminology/deviance, and social psychology. A threat to the Family Studies Center (FSC), housed within the Department, provided the immediate impetus to the founding of the Life Course Center. The Family Studies Center had been headed by the internationally renowned sociologist, Reuben Hill (President of the International Sociological Association, 1970-1974) and through its history included many other leaders in the sociology of the family (e.g., Joan Aldous, Irving Tallman, Ira Reiss, Murray Strauss, and Robert Leik). It was ranked by an internal review committee in 1975 as first among centers of its kind (Fine and Severance 1985). But by the early 80’s, the Center had lost key players--- Hill had retired (1983), and Aldous and Tallman had left the University (in 1974 and 1977, respectively); and federally-sponsored training grants had terminated by the end of the 1970’s (Fine and Severance 1985). In the mid-eighties, facing long-term declines in state funding of higher education, the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) threatened to withdraw its financial support of the Family Studies Center. To retain the resources allocated to the Center (a full-time senior administrative assistant, a small honorarium for the Director, and a small supplies budget), the Sociology Department was told that it could establish a new center if it included a larger number of faculty than the FSC and have greater potential for external funding. After much discussion, two proposals were put on the table. The first, spearheaded by Paul Reynolds, was to establish a Center for Applied Sociology, building on a recently established program in the Department to train graduate students for applied career positions. The second proposal was to establish a Life Course Center. Its advocates thought that such a center would constitute a much wider umbrella than the Family Studies Center, encompassing many of the traditional concerns of family scholars as well as those of other sociological subfields, already strong in the department (criminology, deviance, aging, death and dying, and social psychology). This second proposal was approved by departmental vote.
I directed the Life Course Center from 1986-2006, and received tremendous support during that time from Professors Willy Jasso, Candace Kruttschnitt, Robert Leik, and Roberta Simmons. I must say that it was successful in achieving its initial goals---to incorporate more faculty and to secure external support. Small summer research grants encouraged faculty in diverse substantive areas to explore their research questions from a life course perspective. This “seed grant” funding stimulated life course research in diverse sub-areas, preliminary studies that often provided the groundwork for external funding. A major early success was the receipt of NIMH funding for the Youth Development Study (YDS) in 1987, whose initial purpose was to examine the effects of early work experience on young people’s mental health, development, and attainment. A decade later we received a multidisciplinary National Research Service Award from NIMH (in collaboration with the Institute of Child Development and the Department of Health Services Research in the School of Public Health). This training grant supported both predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees from 1996 to 2006.
Moen: What drew you to a life course theoretical framing?
Mortimer:
I have been doing life-course related research since my graduate school days at the University of Michigan in the mid-sixties, before the principles of the life course were set forth. I began by studying parental influences on occupational decision-making, using data from a longitudinal study of college students, collected by psychologists Theodore Newcomb and Gerald Gurin. My doctoral dissertation (1972) revealed parental influences on adolescents’ occupational values and linkages between such values (intrinsic and extrinsic) and career choice. I conducted a follow-up study of the same respondents ten years post-graduation to assess whether their earlier values actually predicted their subsequent careers. I discovered a reciprocal process implicating values in both occupational selection and socialization. Not only did values predict congruent occupational selection; work experience accentuated values that were the very basis of career choice. Later, I found similar reciprocal processes of occupational selection and socialization using data from the nationally representative Quality of Employment Survey (QES), but psychological orientations appeared to be more responsive to the effects of work experiences among younger than older workers. I wondered, given the widespread part-time employment of adolescents in the 1970’s and 80’s, about whether these youngest workers (not included in the QES) were particularly “impressionable” with respect to the development of orientations toward work, and about the broader implications of work experience for their development. These questions motivated the founding of the Youth Development Study (YDS) in 1987. As will be apparent to readers of the Ledger, my early work clearly implicated the life course principles, articulated so eloquently by Glen Elder, of “linked lives”, “agency”, and “timing.” It led me to embark on a career-long quest to understand life course processes, particularly during the transition to adulthood. The YDS has morphed from a study of high school students to a three generational study lasting more than 30 years. My more recent work continues to address principles of “linked lives” and “agency” (the intergenerational reproduction of social class and intergenerational reciprocity through the life course) and has drawn on the principle of ‘time and place” (differences across generations in adolescent agentic processes).
Moen: Why do you think the Life Course Center -- and the life course perspective-- continues to be important?
Mortimer:
The life course perspective continues to thrive as a framework for research and policy because its omnibus character promotes insights with respect to widely diverse phenomena surrounding human lives. Because it is inherently multidisciplinary, its principles and concepts are widely invoked, inspiring scholars across diverse scholarly fields, including sociologists, psychologists, historians, epidemiologists, and others. A vibrant Life Course Center is needed to provide a venue for interdisciplinary collaboration, counteracting the many institutional and structural forces that impede such work. In fact, the structure and functioning of colleges and universities continue to privilege mono-disciplinary orientations and activities, including the organization of academic departments, tenure and promotion criteria, journal rankings, etc., despite increasing awareness of the necessity of interdisciplinary approaches to research problems, which funding agencies increasingly prefer. I expect the life course perspective, and its institutional embodiment in the Life Course Center, will continue to be vibrant for many years to come.
Reference cited
Fine, Gary Alan and Janet S. Severance. 1985. “Great Men and Hard Times: Sociology at the University of Minnesota.” Sociological Quarterly 26 (1): 117-134.