Introduction: Reconstructive biographical research

Abstract

French

Reconstructive biographical research is a diverse and differentiated sociological field. In this introduction, we trace its interdisciplinary and transnational historical development, consider the most important theoretical influences, and characterize central research areas. In this way, we show that reconstructive biographical research is a distinct sociological approach to social analysis. It offers a reflexive access to understanding, classifying, and explaining social processes and social challenges through the analysis of experienced and/or narrated life stories.

Keywords

Biographical research interpretive research methodology narrative/life stories process analysis social constructivism

Reconstructive biographical research is a distinct sociological approach to social analysis. It explores the interrelation between ‘biography’ and ‘society’ and thus belongs to those sociological approaches that are linked to the assumption that ‘society’ is made up of individuals and cannot be conceived independently of their interpretations and actions. In other words, reconstructive biographical research is not about simply retelling life stories or subjective perspectives to support a particular thesis or theory, as is sometimes assumed. Rather, it claims to understand, classify, and explain social processes through the study of biographies. With this special issue – the first issue of Current Sociology to be devoted to biographical research in the past three decades – we would like to show how reconstructive biographical research represents a central, well-founded, and reflexive sociological approach to reconstructing social phenomena and related social challenges of the present from a processual perspective.

Approaches that address the biographical as a social phenomenon are diverse and can be found in various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. They include theories of the biographical, as well as considerations concerning the collection and analysis of biographical material, either in ‘natural’ form (e.g. diaries, letters, photographs) or generated in the research process, usually through life history interviews.

In this issue of Current Sociology Monographs, however, the focus is on a particular, sociological form of biographical research – reconstructive biographical research. This has developed since the late 1970s as part of the emerging interpretive sociology, in the Federal Republic of Germany in particular. The central question discussed was how the relationship of biographical narratives to social reality and social structures can be theoretically and methodologically grasped and justified (e.g. Alheit, 1994; Bertaux and Kohli, 1984; Kohli, 1978). Reconstructive biographical research offers detailed and methodologically reflective proposals for the analysis of experienced and/or narrated life stories (Fischer-Rosenthal, 2000; Rosenthal, 1993, 2004; Riemann and Schütze, 1991; Schütze, 2008a, 2008b, 2014). This theoretical and methodological ‘program’ sets it apart from other biographical approaches, such as those established in sociology in life course research.

At the same time, reconstructive biographical research is by no means a uniform theoretical approach or even a single method. Rather, today it is a diverse and differentiated field of research. This is not least due to its historical development, which has been interdisciplinary and transnational (Apitzsch and Inowlocki, 2000; Breckner, 2015; Riemann, 2006) and is characterized by various theoretical influences. In this issue, we want to present this lively and exciting field of research, which continues to develop up to the present. Our selection of contributors has been guided by the idea of presenting a wide range of methodological and thematical foci in the field of biographical social research, by featuring prominent active biographical researchers, as well as junior researchers. Below, we briefly present the history, basic theoretical assumptions, and central research areas, without making any claim of completeness.

Biography in the history of sociology

Biographical accounts were recognized as an important source of data early in the history of sociology and in different regional contexts. For example, collecting biographies was one of the methods used in the early 1930s in the study ‘Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community’, conducted in Austria by Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel (2003 [1933]).¹ However, the use of biographical methods was most common in studies conducted by the Chicago School. Examples include ‘Jack Roller’ by Clifford. R. Shaw (1930) and – most prominently – ‘The Polish Peasant in Europe and America’ by William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1918–1920), which is generally seen as the beginning of sociological biographical research. After Znaniecki returned to his native Poland from the United States, biographical research flourished there in the interwar period and was shaped by Jan Szczepański and Józef Chałasiński (cf. Kaźmierska, 2010: 153–155).

In contrast, the importance of and interest in biographical studies in the United States decreased with the waning of the first Chicago School and the increasing dominance of quantitative research. In the 1970s, however, interest in the ‘biographical method’ awakened in other European contexts, such as France (Bertaux, 1981), and especially in German-speaking countries (Kohli, 1978) – and later in other countries such as Great Britain (Chamberlayne et al., 2000; Miller, 2000). Various further developments that emerged mark the transition to reconstructive biographical research. On the one hand, the biographical approach in the tradition of the Chicago School was ‘re-adopted’ by researchers in European countries (Apitzsch and Siouti, 2007: 4). This happened in the context of the introduction of new theoretical and methodological approaches in U.S. sociology at that time, such as social constructivism (Berger and Luckmann, 1966), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) or conversation analysis (Sacks, 1984), and symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969). The phenomenologically oriented sociology of Alfred Schütz (1967 [1932]) had a major influence, especially because of its conceptualization of the notion of ‘lifeworld’.² Subsequently, Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann (1973) discussed the analysis of biographies as an approach to everyday knowledge. On this basis, a fundamental and social theoretical foundation was created for the collection and analysis of data for reconstructive biographical research. A further influence came from industrial sociology, which had begun to collect the narratives of workers (Bahrdt, 1975), and from oral history, which developed at the same time (with some precursors in the USA) and aimed to include people’s experiences or everyday life, a kind of ‘history from below’, in the study of historical developments (Passerini, 1986; Thompson, 1992).

A central step toward the international, cross-regional institutionalization of biographical research was taken by the Research Committee ‘Biography and Society’ of the International Sociological Association (ISA), founded in 1984. Reconstructive biographical research is now taught in various regions of the world and used as a research approach in sociology in particular, but also in related subjects such as education, anthropology, history, and social work. Regional emphases can be identified, especially in Europe, South and North America, and East Asia.

Basic assumptions of reconstructive approaches

At least three basic assumptions are shared by the different reconstructive approaches that adopt biographies or biographical narratives as ‘data’ for sociological research: the first assumption is that an analysis of biographies helps us to understand the relationship between individual lives and social and historical processes. The second assumption is that accounts of lived experiences have to be obtained directly from the people concerned and in the context of their daily life, either to reconstruct life courses or to gain access to people’s internalized patterns of interpretation. Third, a perspective in which social actors are seen not as just passive ‘internalizers’ of social structures and meanings but as being capable of actively processing interpretations of social realities.

An important basis for this kind of thinking is social constructivism (Berger and Luckmann, 1966), which assumes that ‘social reality’ is perceived as a ‘given’ by the individual, but that ‘social reality’ is itself produced through subjective and intersubjective processes of construction. In other words, individuals can play an active role in shaping social reality without denying their subordination to established social objectivations. As actors, individuals both (co-)create and suffer from social reality. Thus, social reality and its history cannot be comprehended without individuals; collective history and life histories are necessarily interdependent.

Based on these assumptions, ‘biography’ is understood as a social construct (Fischer and Kohli, 1987: 35; cf. Kohli, 1986) that is formed and shaped in friction with social structures:

We understand “biography” as an everyday-world construct that includes the ambiguity of given regularity and emergence in equal measure. Accordingly, sociological biographical analysis can meet the needs of both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ analysis insofar as it can reveal experience and intention in the concept of action, as well as the schema underlying action pre-intentionally (translation by the authors).

Biographies as social constructs are both socially and individually shaped. Life experiences are, on the one hand, specific to the biographer, but, on the other hand, also belong to the general sphere in each specific historical situation. Accordingly, the interest of any biographical research is twofold: First, it asks questions about ‘how’ people shape their biographies in specific historical, social, and cultural contexts and how these contexts shape biographies. Second, the construct of biography is used to make statements about social structures that are interrelated with biographies – and thus not only about the subjectively intended meaning in narrated life stories and present subjective interpretations of social structures, as critics complain. The biographical approach makes it possible to explore the basic sociological issue of the relationship between individual and society, avoiding the dichotomy of ‘subjective experience’, on the one hand, and ‘objective social structure’, on the other hand, and instead regarding this relationship as dialectical and examining it as such (Breckner, 2015; Rosenthal, 1993).

However, and this is another common basic assumption, there is no universally valid way to do this, but it must always be done in relation to concrete experiences in concrete contexts. Thus, sound and detailed empirical research is essential for reconstructive biographical approaches.

Common procedures of different reconstructive biographical approaches include, first of all, the use of life history interviews (mostly narrative-biographical interviews) as a central data collection instrument (Rosenthal, 2004; Schütze, 2014). These interviews are characterized in their design by the fact that they offer the interviewees the greatest possible openness for an autonomous self-presentation and enable them to follow their own relevance structures. Further commonalities of the different reconstructive approaches are the use of case reconstructions, as well as the formation of types and non-numerical generalization from the individual case. This is based on the idea that social phenomena and their structuring interrelationships (arising for instance from socialization, gender, and education) can only be grasped by taking into account the overall shape of a biography. Reconstructive studies usually develop empirically based theories (as middle-range theories) in the tradition of Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967).

All analytical approaches to reconstructive biographical research have in common that the opposition of an objective social reality and a subjective narrative should be overcome by the premise of the mutual constitution of society and individuals. However, there were, and still are, very different conceptions of what scope or focus reconstructive analyses can have in biographical research. The question arises to what extent biographical accounts based on memories in the present make it possible to approach the past experiences of biographers, that is, to what extent social reality is represented in their narratives. Critics have objected that French and early German biographical research presupposed that personal narratives and the corresponding life-historical experiences were homologous – that is, for using narratives too hastily to make inferences concerning the level of experience, and thus, the level of past action and thought structures (Bourdieu, 2017 [1986]; Bude, 1985; for an overview, see Apitzsch and Inowlocki, 2000: 57–58). This barely justified accusation led nevertheless to the further refinement and explication of methodological approaches in biographical research.

In his approach, Fritz Schütze, (2008a, 2008b, 2014) puts special emphasis on the reconstruction of sequences of actions and experiences. For this purpose, he developed a three-step narrative analysis with reference to the narrative theory of William Labov and Joshua Waletzki. Schütze argues that the reconstruction of experiences from present narrations offers a first approach to the structure of experience at the time and to biographical process structures. Other approaches, on the other hand, analyze the production of biographical ideas and overall concepts (biographization), or focus on biography as an object of professional action and thus move identity work into the center of interest, which is conceptualized as biographicity. Biographical work and biographical knowledge become central concepts in this context (Alheit, 2010). The method of biographical case reconstruction as developed by Gabriele Rosenthal (1993) is based on the assumption of a structural difference between experienced life history and narrated life story. She proposes an analytical separation and contrasting of these two levels. By suggesting a perspective based on Gestalt theory, she emphasizes that the presentation of past experiences is always mediated by later experiences, as well as by the interview situation and the present perspective. All these aspects influence how memories of the past are approached in an interview and the way memories present themselves to the interviewee.

Fields of work and topics

In recent decades, scholars interested in biographical research have engaged in a large number of research fields. Because biographical research is dynamic and we are unable to cover all these fields, we will briefly discuss here some of the most prominent areas in which the impact of biographical methodology and theory has become visible, and which are reflected in the articles presented in this special issue.

Historical, process-oriented approach – transformation –intergenerationality – memory and remembering. As a sociology of time (Löw, 2016 [2001]: 2), biographical research is always a process-oriented or historical approach. It often deals with social transformation processes. It allows a sociology oriented toward everyday life, which, with its diachronic character, counters the ‘flight from the past’ and present-centeredness (Elias, 1987) that can also be found in the field of empirical social research. In its structure, it reflects – to quote Elias again–both socio-genetic and psycho-genetic aspects of historical processes as interwoven. If biographical research is practiced as a historically oriented method, we believe it can be described as the only qualitative method of empirical social research that allows for a decidedly historical and inherently process-oriented approach (see also Rosenthal, 2012). With its process orientation, it can reconstruct social change over long periods of time. To quote Max Weber (1949 [1904]: 72), it thus enables us to understand ‘on the one hand the relationships and the cultural significance of [social reality’s] individual events in their contemporary manifestations and on the other the causes of their being historically so and not otherwise’.

This outlook provoked a historical and processual orientation, in particular studies of the historical period of National Socialism and its long-term effects (Kaźmierska, 2012; Rosenthal, 1998), and of the transformation of former socialist states in Eastern Europe (Breckner et al., 2000; Kaźmierska and Waniek, 2020). The diachronic orientation of biographical research gives it added value in thematic contexts, social milieus, or geographic regions where there is little written documentation – for example, in research on youth groups, informal neighborhood contexts, or in the case of lost documentation (Becker, 2020; Santos, 2010).

Especially, Elias, referred to above, is at the heart of current debates on the need to consistently see biographical courses as part of changing figurations in their collective and historical dimension. This is shown by Gabriele Rosenthal and Artur Bogner in their article on ‘Social-constructivist and figurational biographical research’ in this issue. To investigate the mutual constitution of individuals and society, the authors argue, one has to avoid the isolated consideration of single individuals. Rather, they argue, a historical approach is necessary that also takes into account power inequalities and interdependencies between different groupings and we-groups. Rosenthal and Bogner exemplify this with examples from their research on the current situation of former rebel soldiers in Uganda who have returned to civilian life.

Biographical research has also gained great importance in generational research and intergenerational transmission, as it allows us to collect and contrast experiences and (self-) presentations of members of different social or familial generational groups. This is particularly evident in research on (the aftermath of) the Holocaust and National Socialism (Inowlocki, 1993; Kovács and Vajda, 2002; Rosenthal, 1998) and in research on social mobility (Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame, 1997 [1988]) and postrevolutionary societies in Europe (Semenova, 2002), as well as in studies on the intergenerational impact of collective violence in other world regions (Rosenthal, 2016, Rosenthal and Bogner, this volume). In this context, biographical research has made an important contribution to the conceptualization of memory and memory processes, both in the conceptualization of individual memories and in the field of the genesis, continuity, and transformation of collective memories (Pohn-Lauggas, 2021).

It has already been indicated that there are some points of overlap here with historical studies, especially oral history. This led to close cooperation between the two subjects, especially in the 1980s. Kaja Kaźmierska and Jakub Gałęziowski use the example of Poland to show the advantages of such interdisciplinary collaboration and the challenges it faces. In ‘Together or apart. Doing biographical research in an interdisciplinary context’, the sociologist and the historian argue for maintaining the ‘identity’ of the respective disciplines and yet searching for a common space for research and reflecting on this endeavor ethically and analytically.

Related to discussions on the character of (late) modernity, biographical studies have tackled various transformation processes, such as transformation of religiosity (Wohlrab-Sahr, 1995), education and lifelong learning (Alheit, 2010; Alheit and Dausien, 2007; Dausien, 1996), or occupations and work (Alheit and Dausien, 1985; Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame, 1981; Brose, 1989; Kohli, 1994). In this monograph, Giorgios Tsiolis and Irini Siouti analyze the current restructuring of the world of work from the perspective of biographical research. In their article ‘Exploring biographies in a rapidly changing labour world’, they show how flexible and precarious working conditions, the emergence of the ‘entreployee’, and the subjectification of work have become significant biographically and in everyday life. They reconstruct how new worker subjectivities emerge and look for biographical ‘resources’ to resist the new demands.

Marginalized lifeworlds

Through its qualitative data collection instruments, reconstructive biographical research opens up possibilities for capturing the lifeworlds of marginalized groups and minorities. It strives – in the tradition of the Chicago School – to take the lifeworlds and the stories of experiences of ‘outsiders’ seriously, to record them analytically in detail, and to give them sociological attention. Biographical methods offer a special added value in that they make it possible to trace processes of intersection and interrelation in respect of different categories of inequality, such as (for example) race, gender, class, disability, age, or generation in the course of a person’s life, and in doing so, to capture dimensions that have been given little consideration. It approaches social inequality in an open manner and not with a fixed categorical system, thus enabling the formulation of relevant aspects from the perspective of the actors’ stories of action and experience. Sociological biographical research is thus frequently discussed in connection with the concept of intersectionality (Apitzsch, 2012; Davis, 2014; Gilliéron, 2022; Köttig, 2015; Lutz and Davis, 2005; Lutz et al., 2011). In an exemplary way, Naida Menezes and Priscila Susin demonstrate in their paper how reconstructive biographical research can bring marginalized voices of outsiders into focus. ‘Exploring biographical case reconstructions of women with housing instability experience in South Brazil’ examines the impact of the housing crisis in Brazil on the urban poor. The authors analyze the narratives of women who have experienced forced evictions and of women who are active in social movements in occupied houses. They highlight the different strategies women choose, legally or illegalized, to procure housing and appropriate spaces, and the extent to which these conform, or do not conform, to established gender roles.

Transnationality/translocality

The orientation toward biographical trajectories and family histories has always prevented biographical research from being completely nationalized. The danger of methodological nationalism (Weiß and Nohl, 2012; Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002) is countered by analytically integrating all relevant and different national and regional contexts and their interconnections when analyzing biographical trajectories. This was particularly reflected in studies on transnational connections and migration processes (e.g. Apitzsch and Siouti, 2007; Brandhorst, 2021; Breckner, 2007; Breckner et al., 2000; Delcroix, 2013; Pape, 2020; Siouti, 2016; Tsiolis, 2012; Yi, 2021). From the perspective of biographical research, a person’s life before migrating, the migration itself, and conditions in the context of arrival are all relevant with regard to migration. The research is thus not limited to ‘integration’ or ‘migration drivers’, but sees migration in the context of the entire biography, as has recently been shown, for example, in studies of refugee migration processes (Bahl and Becker, 2020; Worm, 2019). In this context, the relationship between biography and space in a general sense has been reflected upon (Becker, 2021). More recently, the discussion of biographical studies in the context of intercultural research (Matthes, 1985) has been revisited with the aim of explicitly addressing global processes and research in the Global South in biographical research and transforming it into collaborative research (Burchardt and Becker, in press).

The question of how citizenship, language, labor market, education, and training policies affect migrants in transnational spaces is explored by Ursula Apitzsch and Lena Inowlocki in their paper ‘Reconstructing biographical knowledge: Biographical Policy Evaluation towards a structural understanding of transnational migration’. In this article, transnational spaces are understood as ‘multiple networks of national, legal, and cultural transitions to which individuals orient themselves biographically and in which they are simultaneously enmeshed as collectives of experience’. Within the framework of a biographical policy evaluation, the two authors examine the recurrent paradoxical effects of policies that force migrants to find solutions for shaping their life practices. In doing so, they show that members of a multigenerational family are affected differently by policies due to different categories of inequality such as age, generation, legal status, and gender.

In a further article with this thematic orientation, Johannes Becker, Hendrik Hinrichsen, and Arne Worm argue in favor of a de-migrantization of migration research and its broadening as social research from the perspective of biographical studies and figurational sociology. In their paper ‘On the emergence and changing positions of old-established groupings in migration contexts: A process perspective on group formation in Jordan’, they approach the question of how the category of ‘old-established’, as a we-image and power resource of long-time residents in a particular geographical context, is created and becomes transformed or weakened in the face of incoming migrants. Using a sociohistorically informed multigenerational study of the history of an extended Jordanian family, they show how its positioning has changed in interaction with developments in the collective history of the region over the past 70 years or so.

Methodological plurality

Even though biographical interviews constitute the central data collection instrument, (reconstructive) biographical research has always been practiced as multimethod research since its beginnings, for instance, in the study by Thomas and Znaniecki (1918-1920). In addition to the explicit combination of different methods, this can be shown in the example of a biographical-narrative interview setting: in this very open form of data collection, the interviewer is at the same time in the role of a participant observer and is always bodily, emotionally and communicatively involved. Photographs or other documents may be brought to the interview by interviewees. Furthermore, understanding biographies as social constructs also means thinking of discourses, collective patterns of interpretation, and so on, as biographical matrices. From the 2000s onward, biographical research has entered a phase in which it has more explicitly become a multimethod approach. Studies have been published that theoretically and methodologically address the question of combining methods and develop corresponding research designs that bring various practical methods together. These include using written self-presentations, such as diaries (Völter, 2003); linkage with discourse analysis procedures (Alber, 2016; Pohn-Lauggas, 2017; Schiebel, 2011; Spies, 2009); incorporating ethnographic material (Becker and Rosenthal, 2022; Delcroix and Pape, 2010; Pape, 2020; Schäfer, 2021; Wundrak, 2010); group discussions (Bogner and Rosenthal, 2020), and visual dimensions (Breckner, 2021; Pohn-Lauggas, 2016; Schiebel and Robel, 2011; Witte, 2010). The search for an appropriate combination of methods occupies a central place in the article by Roswitha Breckner and Elisabeth Mayer. In ‘Social media as a means of visual biographical performance’, they show the influence of digital image media on how biographies are perceived and how biographies are constructed. The authors ask whether these processes of technological change mean that established concepts of biography need to be expanded to include visual dimensions of the construction of biographies. Using examples from Austria and Brazil, they show how the construction of biographies in social media differs from verbal or visual constructions, but is nevertheless connected.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Maria Pohn-Lauggas

Notes

Author biographies

Johannes Becker is a research fellow at the University of Göttingen and at Leipzig University, Germany. His research revolves around the relationship between biographies, history and space in the context of transformation processes such as the formation of nation states and reconfigurations of urban contexts. Extensive research experience on cities, migration and family.

Maria Pohn-Lauggas is a professor at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Her research interests include collective memories and the intergenerational transmission of collective violence in the past, for instance under National Socialism or enslavement and the trading of enslaved people. She also focuses on visual memory practices.

Hermílio Santos is Professor at PUCRS in Porto Alegre (Brazil), documentary filmmaker (for instance “Lifeworld - The Sociology of Alfred Schutz”) and President of the ISA RC 38 “Biography and Society”.

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