ADOLESCENCEincrease in earnings. That is, work tends to be-
come more complex and to produce more earn-
ings through the high school years (Mortimer et
al. 1994).
Second, adolescent work can have positive or
negative consequences, depending on the extent
and the quality of the experience, as well as its
meaning. For example, work of high intensity (that
is, exceeding twenty hours of work on average
across all weeks employed) curtails postsecondary
education among boys and increases alcohol use
and smoking among high school girls (Mortimer
and Johnson 1998). But adolescents engaged in
low-intensity work during high school have favor-
able outcomes with respect to schooling (for boys)
and part-time work (for both boys and girls).
Third, the quality of work matters. For exam-
ple, several studies show that jobs that draw on or
confer skills deemed useful in the workplace are
associated with feelings of efficacy during the high
school years as well as success in the job market
three years after high school (Finch et al. 1991;
Stern and Nakata 1989). Similarly, adolescent work
experiences can have positive implications for de-
velopment depending on how they fit into the
adolescent’s life. Thus, when earnings are saved
for college, working actually has a positive effect
on grades (Marsh 1991), and nonleisure spending
(e.g., spending devoted to education or savings)
may enhance relationships with parents (Shanahan
et al. 1996). In short, the adolescent work career
can pose positive or negative implications for sub-
sequent attainment and adjustment.
Life course agency in adolescence. Whereas
the concept of pathways reflects an interest in how
organizations and institutions allocate youth to
social positions and their attendant opportunities
and limitations, young people are also active agents
attempting to realize goals and ambitions. It is
unlikely that most youth were agents in this sense
before or during the founding of the republic. In a
detailed study of autobiographical life histories
between 1740 and 1920, Graff (1995) observes
that lives marked by conscious choice and self-
direction, a search for opportunities including
social mobility, the instrumental use of further
education, and risk-taking in the commercial mar-
ketplace, were atypical before the nineteenth cen-
tury. In some accounts this emerging orientation
was expressed in explicit emulation of the widely
circulated autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,
who emphasized planning, thrift, decision mak-
ing, and independence. Before this period, the
major features of the life course—including edu-
cation, occupation, and family life—were largely
determined by family circumstances. (The notable
exception to a lack of decision making about one’s
life was religious ‘‘rebirth.’’ Departing from Catho-
lic and Lutheran doctrine, religious sects such as
the Anabaptists emphasized the adolescent’s con-
scious decision to be baptized and then lead an
appropriately Christian life [Mitterauer 1992].)This active orientation toward the life course
gained currency as ‘‘conduct-of-life’’ books in the
first decades of the nineteenth century departed
from Puritan hostility to assertiveness in order to
emphasize the building of a decisive character
marked by ‘‘a strenuous will’’ (e.g., as found in
John Foster’s popular essay ‘‘Decision of Charac-
ter’’ of 1805). The message was especially appeal-
ing to the large number of young men leaving
rural areas for the city in search of jobs. Since that
time, themes such as self-reliance, decisiveness,
willpower, and ambition have recurred in popular
advice books and social commentaries directed to
adolescents and their parents (Kett 1977). Indeed,
a view of ‘‘youth as shapers of youth’’ has become
prominent among social historians of the twenti-
eth century (for a superb example, see Modell 1989).In contemporary times, a conception of life as
shaped through decision-making, planning, and
persistent effort is common. A particularly useful
concept to study this phenomenon is planful com-
petence, the thoughtful, assertive, and self-controlled
processes that underlie selection into social insti-
tutions and interpersonal relationships (Clausen
1991a). Although these traits can be found in
approaches to personality (e.g., conscientiousness),
planful competence is uniquely concerned with
the ability to select social settings that best match a
person’s goals, values, and strengths. That is, planful
competence describes the self’s ability to negotiate
the life course as it represents a socially structured
set of age-graded opportunities and limitations.
Clausen (1991b, 1993) maintains that a planful
orientation in mid-adolescence (about ages 14 and
15) is especially relevant to the life course because
it promotes realistic decision-making about the
roles and relationships of adulthood. That is, one’s
self-reflexivity, confidence, and self-regulation at