This chapter deals with the biographical situation and coping strategies of highly educated cadres under the authoritarian regime of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). It draws from a study of work biographies of contemporary East German managers who had previously been economic cadres in the GDR. The second part of the chapter considers methodological difficulties of cross-cultural research, particularly in the arenas of post-socialist transformation research and migration research. The problem of providing an adequate framework of interpretation for the social phenomena of a culture unfamiliar to the researcher will be captured by the notion of lacking the ‘common sense knowledge of social structures’ (Garfinkel, 1972) of the life world under scrutiny.

The database of this study consists of 17 narrative interviews with East German managers who had been economic cadres under socialism and who succeeded in retaining leading positions after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. At the time of the GDR, they all belonged to the operative elite of the economic system, but not the political elite. As managers of former GDR companies, it was they who put the economic transformation into practice. They were aged in their early 40s in 1989 and about 50 in 1999, the time of the interview.

A central concept of this chapter is that of ‘the institutionalised life-course regime’. While this is applied to the former GDR in the first instance, my argument is that modernisation and globalisation processes are increasingly bringing lives in ‘Western’ societies under the sway of institutionalised lifecourse processes, not least in welfare systems. Research on economic managers shows the effectiveness of interpretive methods in revealing the interplay within individual responses between cultural (and family) traditions and institutionalised life-course forms. It also suggests both the rich potential of biographical research for macro-sociological diagnosis and prognosis, and the importance of biographical understandings for working ‘with the subject’, as is being promised in the ‘new’ social policy.

Since interpretive data analysis bears much in common with casework strategies underlying social welfare services, its results can be understood as an additional empowerment of personnel in social work and even in social policy, ‘additional’ in the sense of both further detailing the professional knowledge base and sensitising awareness of latent consequences of action and intervention.