In the chapters that follow a number of papers pursue the relevance of life history methods to our understanding of the social world. The vital difference between life stories and narratives and fully developed life histories is that the story or narrative is located in the historical context in which lives are embodied and embedded. The storylines and scripts by which we recount our lives are related to the conditions and possibilities current in particular historical periods. It is therefore important to develop social constructionist perspectives to understand and develop changing historical contexts.

The first chapter in the methods section therefore looks at an early attempt to define Social Constructionist Perspectives for the study of curriculum. As Esland has noted: ‘trying to focus the individual biography in its socio-historical context is in a very real sense attempting to penetrate the symbolic drift of school knowledge, and the consequences for the individuals who are caught up in it and attempting to construct their reality through it’. Mills has argued that social science ideally deals with ‘problems of biography, history and of their intersections within social structures’. Hence the chapter argues that social constructionist study should focus on the individual life history and career; the group or collective; professions, categories, subjects or discipline that evoke rather as social movements over time. Likewise schools and classrooms develop patterns of stability and change; and finally the various relations between individuals and between groups and collectives, and between individuals, groups and collectivities over time.

This approach is further developed in the next chapter on History, Context and Qualitative Methods. A major part of the chapter presents one teachers life history and does so because ‘this episode in a subject teachers life illustrates the way that the collection of life histories and elucidation of the historical context can combine’. I argue that: Above all the strength of beginning curriculum research from life history data is that from the outset the work is firmly focused on the working lives of practitioners ...In articulating their response to historical factors and structural constraints, life storytellers provide us with sensitising devices for the analysis of these constraints and the manner in which they are experienced. The Story of Life History provides a brief summary of the historical emergence of the life history tradition particularly at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. In its first incarnation ‘the life history approach fell from grace and was largely abandoned by social scientists’. At first this was because of the increasingly powerful advocacy of statistical methods but also because the qualitative nature of the method undercut sociology’s claim to scientific status. Moreover even among ethnographically inclined sociologists, more emphasis came to be placed on inter-active situations than on biography as the basis for understanding human behaviour.

In the 1970s a re-emergence of life history methods gathered force and with the new ‘condition of post-modernity’ this led to a large-scale rehabilitation of life history study. The current concern with understanding identity and subjectivity means that having failed the ‘objectivity tests’ under modernism, life history work is now very much back on the agenda. As we shall see later in the ‘individualised society’ we need new strategies for exploring peoples ‘life politics’ and indeed their ‘moral careers’. The next section of this volume turns to these matters.

In Preparing for Post-modernity, I argue that ‘life politics, the politics of identity construction and ongoing identity maintenance’ will become a major and growing site of ideological and intellectual contestation with the progressive marketisation or privatisation of so many institutional settings. This means that these institutional sites may no longer be the central and most significant arenas for contestation and it also means that the methodological genres, which focus solely on institutional analysis and theorising, may be similarly diminished.

But if institutional life is being penetrated by marketisation and globalisation this does not mean that the individual’s life politics remain in any way beyond the fray. The outreach of these world movements acknowledges no boundaries, indeed as the struggle around the Genome Project has highlighted our own bodies and genes are now within range. In The Story So Far we note how in the cultural logic of corporate rule, the life story, represents a form of cultural apparatus to accompany a newly aggrandising world order. The story then comes to stand as a form of commentary in itself, often divorced from any provision of contextual commentary. This strategy is increasingly evident in the media and overwhelmingly present in what some commentators now call the ‘narrative politics’ of America. In the new politics it is not the policies or programme that the voters recognise but the story, hyper-real as it may be, that they are told.