Calling over the Life Course
Calling over the Life Course
Sociological Insights
Undergraduate education can make it seem as though vocational reflection and discernment is a once-and-for-all event, in which students find sudden enlightenment about their futures. In reality, we continue to discern our vocations over the course of our entire lives. We can better understand this process with attention to sociological categories and particularly to the life course perspective. This approach emphasizes the importance of transitions and turning points, which are here illustrated in the lives of individuals who found their callings through a winding path. This perspective also demonstrates that the advantages and disadvantages that accrue to certain individuals (due to differences in race, class, and gender) have more than merely one-time effects; these experiences accumulate over time, creating a kind of sedimentation that amasses over the course of one’s life. Vocational discernment is most successful when it is attentive to these social factors.
Keywords: vocation, calling, sociology, life course perspective, life transitions, accumulation of advantage, accumulation of disadvantage, age cohorts, long-term vocational discernment
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
