Change in the way individuals and households live in, use and consume housing over the course of their lives has been, and remains, a dynamic field of housing research. While Kemeny (1992) and others (Clapham, 2005a; O’Neil, 2008) have decried the failure of housing studies to engage with contemporary sociological theory, researchers from across the globe have quietly amassed a significant body of work that sheds light on the changing relationship between households and the dwellings in which they live over their life course (see, for example, Abramson, 2008; Gram-Hanssen and Bech-Danielsen, 2008; Mandic, 2008). This chapter sets out to review this body of published work and begins with a discussion of the role of risk within contemporary society before moving on to examine debates around housing careers, housing histories, housing biographies and housing pathways. The chapter concludes that there is a need to recast our thinking around this issue and that in the 21st century it is now more appropriate to consider the way individuals move through the housing stock as a set of transitions that embraces both permanent and temporary relocation and the simultaneous occupancy of multiple dwellings. There is also a need to consider the adverse, as well as the positive, outcomes that result from participation in the housing market, explicitly recognising that for many individuals their experience of housing over their life course is not an upward ‘ladder’ of increasing opportunity and consumption.

Risk, the life course and housing

Over the last decade or so a number of sociologists such as Beck (1992; 2000) and Giddens (1999) have written extensively on the concept of a ‘risk society’. They argue that change within economic and social structures has eroded the certainties of the previous ‘Fordist’ or industrial society and resulted in a process of ‘individualisation’ where individuals and households are increasingly confronted by the risks – and opportunities – of a rapidly changing social and economic environment. Giddens (1999) argues that social organisation increasingly avoids risk and seeks forms that are responsive to risk. It is argued that in the past governments and institutions mitigated the level of risk within society through a comprehensive welfare state, strongly developed social institutions (such as family and marriage), and widespread wage employment.