Social policies and the life course – a complex relationship re-visited

Social policies structure individual life courses, cushion individual life course risks, and provide normative orientation. The paper brings together literature from life course sociology and welfare state research in order to provide an updated systematisation of the relationship between individual life courses and social policies. The modern life course regime and its welfare regulation are described as centred around individual actors, and as part and parcel of modernisation processes and the institutional arrangement mediating between the modern (democratic) state and the capitalist economy. Furthermore, the paper discusses these structural roots of life course policies, their resulting characteristics and their normativity. Key aspects in this are individualisation and its limits, the multilevel implementation of social policies and their life course effects with regard to inequalities.