Chapter 6: The paradox of global social change and national path dependencies.

The article focuses on the paradox of global social change and national path dependencies. The idea that one could distinguish two major pathways of development--the modernization of Western liberal democracies in contrast to the development of state socialist societies--had collapsed. But if--with some minor remaining doubt in regard to China--socialism could not represent an alternative developmental goal and trajectory, then the assumption that advanced societies could be grouped together as changing in broadly similar manner regained strength. A concluding remark is in order on how the research program outlined here will have to proceed. A first further step will be to validate the cross-sectional country profiles in regard to institutional configuration, life course outcomes and their inter-linkages. A second major step will have to transform both the institutional configuration and the life course outcomes into diachronic accounts across time, i.e., into accounts of institutional and behavioral change. As a third step, comparative micro-analytic longitudinal studies will have to be employed to unravel the causal linkages between institutional setups and life course regimes.