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CSI0010.1177/00113921231162742Current SociologyBecker et al.

Article CS

Current Sociology

Introduction: Reconstructive
2023, Vol. 71(4) 552­–566
© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00113921231162742
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Johannes Becker
University of Göttingen, Germany

Maria Pohn-Lauggas
University of Göttingen, Germany

Hermílio Santos
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Abstract
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 analy-

sis. 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.

Corresponding author:
Maria Pohn-Lauggas, Institute for Methods and Methodological Principles in the Social Science, University of
Göttingen, Goßlerstraße 19, 37073 Göttingen, Germany.
Email: [email protected]
Becker et al. 553

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 reflex-
ive sociological approach to reconstructing social phenomena and related social chal-
lenges 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 theo-
ries 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 theo-
retically 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 theo-
retical 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
554 Current Sociology 71(4)

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 gener-
ally 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’ awak-
ened 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), eth-
nomethodology (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 bio-
graphical research was taken by the Research Committee ‘Biography and Society’ of the
International Sociological Association (ISA), founded in 1984. Reconstructive biograph-
ical 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 con-
cerned 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
Becker et al. 555

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 intersubjec-
tive processes of construction. In other words, individuals can play an active role in
shaping social reality without denying their subordination to established social objecti-
vations. 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 expe-
riences 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 con-
texts 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 interpreta-
tions of social structures, as critics complain. The biographical approach makes it pos-
sible to explore the basic sociological issue of the relationship between individual and
society, avoiding the dichotomy of ‘subjective experience’, on the one hand, and ‘objec-
tive social structure’, on the other hand, and instead regarding this relationship as dialec-
tical 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 bio-
graphical 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
556 Current Sociology 71(4)

phenomena and their structuring interrelationships (arising for instance from socializa-
tion, 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 biographi-
cal 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 nar-
rations offers a first approach to the structure of experience at the time and to biographi-
cal 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 knowl-
edge become central concepts in this context (Alheit, 2010). The method of biographical
case reconstruction as developed by Gabriele Rosenthal (1993) is based on the assump-
tion 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 expe-
riences 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.
Becker et al. 557

Historical, process-oriented approach – transformation –intergenerationality – mem-

ory 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 struc-
ture, 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 empiri-
cal 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 geo-
graphic 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 interdependen-
cies 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 con-
tribution to the conceptualization of memory and memory processes, both in the concep-
tualization of individual memories and in the field of the genesis, continuity, and
transformation of collective memories (Pohn-Lauggas, 2021).
558 Current Sociology 71(4)

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 con-
text’, the sociologist and the historian argue for maintaining the ‘identity’ of the respec-
tive 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 perspec-
tive of biographical research. In their article ‘Exploring biographies in a rapidly chang-
ing 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 dif-
ferent 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 bio-
graphical research is thus frequently discussed in connection with the concept of inter-
sectionality (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 demon-
strate 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 occu-
pied 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.
Becker et al. 559

Transnationality/translocality
The orientation toward biographical trajectories and family histories has always pre-
vented biographical research from being completely nationalized. The danger of meth-
odological nationalism (Weiß and Nohl, 2012; Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002) is
countered by analytically integrating all relevant and different national and regional con-
texts and their interconnections when analyzing biographical trajectories. This was par-
ticularly 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 condi-
tions 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 relation-
ship 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 intercul-
tural research (Matthes, 1985) has been revisited with the aim of explicitly addressing
global processes and research in the Global South in biographical research and trans-
forming it into collaborative research (Burchardt and Becker, in press).
The question of how citizenship, language, labor market, education, and training poli-
cies 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 bio-
graphical 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 develop-
ments in the collective history of the region over the past 70 years or so.
560 Current Sociology 71(4)

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 exam-
ple of a biographical-narrative interview setting: in this very open form of data collec-
tion, 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 biogra-
phies as social constructs also means thinking of discourses, collective patterns of inter-
pretation, 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 dimen-
sions (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 biog-
raphies 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.

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

ORCID iD
Maria Pohn-Lauggas https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1725-5208

Notes
1. Very early instances of using a biographical method in psychology and pedagogy can be
found in Austria in the 1920s, e.g. Charlotte Bühler and Siegfried Bernfeld (Krüger, 2006:
15). The Nazis put an end to these developments – at least in countries such as Austria and
Germany – by forcing the researchers into exile.
Becker et al. 561

2. By this is meant a preexisting intersubjective world that is taken for granted through a ‘natu-
ral attitude’ (Schütz and Luckmann, 1973) in which individuals recognize and believe in the
things of everyday life as laws and customs that provide orientation for action.

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566 Current Sociology 71(4)

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 inter-
ests 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”.

Résumé
La recherche biographique reconstructive est un domaine sociologique diversifié et différencié.
Dans cette introduction, nous retraçons son développement historique interdisciplinaire et transna-
tional, nous examinons les influences théoriques les plus importantes et nous caractérisons les
principaux domaines de recherche. Nous montrons ainsi que la recherche biographique reconstruc-
tive est une approche sociologique distincte de l’analyse sociale. Elle offre un accès réflexif à la
compréhension, à la classification et à l’explication des processus sociaux et des défis sociaux à
travers l’analyse des récits de vie vécus et/ou narrés.