Introduction to the Special Issue: Exploring Life Courses in Their Making

Up to the end of the 1990s, the scientific and political representation of the Swiss education and transition system’s functioning and underlying mechanisms had been at best fragmentary, largely relying on patchy, mostly cross-sectional data that hardly lent themselves to even adequately describe the system as a whole – let alone providing explanations as to the how and why of its functioning. The launch of TREE was one of the initiatives marking a shift of paradigm with respect to these substantial gaps. TREE gradually expanded into a life-course data infrastructure, now including two cohorts of school leavers (one from 2000 and one from 2016) whose pathways are followed over time. On the occasion of the panel study's twentieth anniversary, a call for papers was launched for a special issue of the Swiss Journal of Sociology (SJS) titled "20 Years of TREE, Transitions from Education to Employment: Exploring Life Courses in Their Making". The issue comprises seven contributions drawing on a wide range of theoretical, analytical and methodological approaches and, in four cases, on TREE data