For those who were on another planet than the social sciences for the last 50 years, let us start by noting who Glen Elder is. Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of sociology and psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), he is the author of Children of the Great Depression.

First published in 1974 and many times reprinted in enlarged editions, this book is a major reference for the life course paradigm. It shows how the economic and social crisis of 1929 in the United States differently affected children born in 1920-1921 and those of 1928-1929. Whereas the youngest cohort had a very tough start in life because of family responses to hardship including coping with scarcity and emotional strain, the oldest cohort was indeed too old to be as vulnerable to family strain and too young to encounter the problems that their parents experienced in the labor market.

Prof. Elder was invited on April 18, 2013 at the University of Geneva for a lecture in the series of public conferences on Vulnerability in the Life Course organized by the Institute for Population and Life Course Studies (IDEMO) and the National Center of Competence in Reseach LIVES. On this occasion, he received in person the doctorate Honoris Causa that the University of Geneva had awarded him last fall during the Dies Academicus. He then gave a talk about his career in relation to the evolving field of life course studies, as viewed in terms of the following paradigmatic principles:

"Linked lives"
Lives are lived interdependently, and relationships shape how individuals interpret life events.

Glen Elder’s mother was an English teacher, who gave him for a lifelong interest in biographies. His father moved from a medical profession to farming: Prof. Elder feels he owes him his sense of innovation.

"Timing of lives"
The impact of life transitions depends on when they occur.

The Elder family moved to the countryside when Glen was 14 years old. “Before that I was a city-kid.” He thus went the opposite way compared to the majority. Once a student in social psychology, he also worked as an orientation counselor for the university, which gave him the idea for his master thesis on “Transition to College”.

"Lives in time and place"
We are the product of a context.

Longitudinal studies started in the 30’s in the United States. When Glen Elder became a post-doctoral researcher in the 60’s, he joined a University of California team that was working on the data that made him famous. Much has happened since then. “Life course publications were less than 50 per year in 1992. They are now above 600 per year. (…) Some of the students we trained are now sitting on the review committees,” rejoices Prof. Elder. “You are in the golden days now. Data are available!”

"Life span development"
Human beings develop beyond childhood - biologically, socially, and psychologically.

“It took me a life to develop a full understanding of the life course.” “Study after study, I saw repetitions, recurrent things,“ which became the material for his theories.

"Human agency"
Humans are not passive but are able to make decisions that shape their lives.

“My boss in Berkeley was continuously fighting for funds to support longitudinal studies in Washington. As a result, I had room to be creative.” “I had to innovate to minimize cost of data collection.” Mixed method was the way: “Qualitative data in the archive enabled us to recode, which enabled us to address new questions.”

Today aged 79, Glen Elder says: “One of the most noted observations of my career is the centrality of resilience in difficult times. Vulnerability and inequality are a cumulative process, but there are always ways out.” The same concept applies to himself. Outside the lecture room, he confesses: "I became a widow after 45 years of happy marriage. Three years later I met Sandy, and she brought light back in my life. I would never have expected such a miracle."

In the musical pecking order, there are performers with top billing whose sounds people pay to listen to reverently. Then, below, there is a whole range of musicians people listen to randomly at a trendy bar or a festival, or to whom they lend just half an ear in a restaurant or on a street corner. "We do not listen in the same way to different types of musicians, depending on whether we consider them artists, partners in an event or just auxiliary staff in the background. This typology is much more significant to the musician's status than the type of music they play," explains Marc Perrenoud, sociologist and researcher for project No. 6 at the LIVES National Center of Competence in Research: "Vulnerability at the Interface of Professional and Family Life: Gender and Occupational Differentials".

Since September 2012, assisted by two students working on their master's degrees, Frédérique Leresche and Jérôme Chapuis, Marc Perrenoud has been doing research in (mainly French-speaking) Switzerland on the musicians who struggle to live off their talents. Between the three of them, they have already conducted about 50 semi-structured interviews with musicians of all styles, members of a semi-professional group, tea-dance entertainers and street players.

The researchers are musicians themselves

All three researchers have a strong connection to music and the musical scene: Marc Perrenoud himself plays double bass and electric bass; while doing his master's and doctorate in France, he played about 600 times in very different public contexts, from Manouche jazz groups, to bebop and funk, to electronic post-rock. "My interests as an ethnographer overlapped those as a musician while diversifying and expanding employment options, all of which became research fields," he says.

In Switzerland, initial findings show that most ordinary musicians have a job on the side, often as music teachers, and some benefit from subsidies for their performances, thanks to the creation of associations of which they become employees or beneficiaries. This situation contrasts with that in France, where ordinary musicians are entitled to the special unemployment allowances available for entertainment workers, or in the United States, where they often split their time between the musical scene and a job outside of music just to put food on the table. Music education doesn't have the same importance in these countries as it does in Switzerland, where 20 percent of the population plays an instrument, compared to an average of 8 percent elsewhere, thus offering an almost natural opportunity for music professionals.

To be or not to be a professional musician

Living entirely from their passion, performing a range of tasks that include teaching - does this make musicians more legitimate? "Some of them seem to think so. But they could also be seen as similar to sports or art teachers, whose profession is different from those of athletes or visual artists," says Perrenoud. "We're still defining the scope of our subject, a basic scientific attitude that is too often neglected. It is all the more necessary in our case, because we are starting without a predefined list, with no filter created by others, since it is still virgin territory," he says. "In any case, we're adopting an interactionist approach, by working in the field, and we define musicians as those whose peers say they are. In France, I noticed that ordinary musicians tend to portray themselves as artisans rather than as artists. This is mainly due to their relationship with musical creation. If you're unknown, you're more often hired to play cover versions than your own music. This tension between art and profession necessarily makes them "lower-level" artists. But in Switzerland, the situation might be different, because they are less exposed to the pressure of playing music sets just to put food on the table..."

A small-scale, fragmented scene

On the other hand, in Switzerland, the musical scene is small-scale and fragmented by cultural regionalism and local subsidies. "If you're known in Bulle, that doesn't mean you'll get a break in Biel. Whereas, in France it is possible to make a local musical career, because there are several large cities where ordinary musicians can play up to 100 times a year within a range of 200 kilometers, with a pool of one million inhabitants."

In several months, once this qualitative study is over, the researchers don't rule out taking a quantitative approach. "That's on the back burner," says Marc Perrenoud, already satisfied by being able to pursue his favorite research subject at LIVES: "We're following careers, which calls for a longitudinal perspective. As for the question of vulnerability, it's not only connected to the economic insecurity that ordinary musicians suffer. We also study it as a process of disaffiliation that can appear in any environment, even one that's economically favorable, as is the case in other IP6 studies of elites, for example. The basic question is why do some people do better than others, what resources are involved..." A well-known tune at LIVES.