As he previously elaborated in Arrested Adulthood (2000), Côté distinguishes between passive “default individualization” and active “developmental individualization” in his analysis of people's orientations concerning their life trajectories.9 Consumer-corporate interests are said to perpetuate and benefit from the default option; pop culture thrives on the illusory notion that individuality is a function of “selecting the right wardrobe or developing slight affectations in speech, behavior or appearance” (2000: 34). An increasing number of adults are seen as taking “paths of least resistance” rather than acquiring “self-discipline, in order to develop advanced skills, aptitudes, and attitudes” (2000: 34). Drawing on his notion of “identity capital,” Côté suggests that individuals need to become successful investors in the identity market in order to reach their potentials despite the machinations of a media-driven pop culture.
While both Arnett and Côté have succeeded in highlighting young people's potential for agency, objections can be raised. Their focus on individual perception and individual agency/passivity psychologizes the meaning of adulthood. This renders the young people under scrutiny agents of their own fate to such an overdrawn extent that the systemic factors that influence their practices all but disappear from view, except to provide obligatory variables. Practitioners in the sociology of youth have shown that today young people are under great pressure to succeed at a time when structural adjustments have softened up the foundations on which they are to build their lives, and that they often do so believing themselves to be solely responsible for their successes and failures (Furlong and Cartmel 1997; McDonald 1999; Wyn and White 2000; Dwyer and Wyn 2001). This blindness to systemic conditions on individuals' behalf has been called “the epistemological fallacy of late modernity” (Furlong and Cartmel 1997). Precisely this fallacy is discursively reproduced and social-scientifically legitimated by the orthodox, highly individualistic approach to adulthood.
Epistemological Fallacy II: The Normative Lag
The prevailing pronouncements about young people's practices have one thing in common: they implicitly use the model of standard adulthood as their benchmark. Wagner and Hayes's (2005: 4) considerations are instructive in this regard: “Our present-day thinking is based on a succession of historically evolved mentalities; on mental edifices which previous generations have constructed, pulled down, renovated and extended. Past events are compressed in images and metaphors which determine our present thinking even if we are not always aware of them.” Standard adulthood, a commonsense life stage in the “thickly viscous form of the past” (Wagner and Hayes 2005: 4), remains conceptually fixed, unproblematic, and thus escapes articulation, let alone analysis. What is seen as worthy of analysis, however, is the failure to reach a taken-for-granted standard at a time of life when this is conventionally deemed most appropriate. In fact, research into the timing of the transition to adulthood has shown that today the realization of the classic markers of adulthood is still expected by most people to occur in their twenties (Arnett 1997; Du Bois-Reymond 1998; Furstenberg et al. 2003; 2004). The nonattainment of these markers by many people in their twenties and beyond is thus taken as a sign that their adolescent state is prolonged, that they in fact defer or reject adulthood for a time, only to emerge into the standard model of adulthood later. What is most significant for now is the fact that the current benchmark of adult behavior is anachronistic. Ideal types are useful instruments in sociological methods. As is well known, Max Weber (1922) advocated their use. But proponents of the delayed adulthood thesis not only refrain from using standard adulthood as an ideal type in order to gauge present or past deviations from it, but actually confuse a historically contingent model with contemporary social realities and continue to posit the ideal type as the normative telos to individual development. What is more, the outdated model is often held up as something to be striven for at a time when the realization of standard adulthood is for many not only impossible, but also hardly desirable (e.g., Du Bois-Reymond 1998; see also chapters 5 and 6 in this volume). Social scientists, journalists, and marketers, members of the previous generation as well as young adults themselves are thus frequently subject to a normative lag between the idea of standard adulthood and contemporary realities. In the long view of history such delays are commonly recognized: “Mentalities are at any one time the most sluggish components of historical change. They lag behind…and establish contradictions and rogue complications in historical development…In this way, they become the driving force behind new change” (Wagner and Hayes 2005: 3). In our specific context, analysis of this normative lag is perhaps nowhere of greater urgency than in those policy domains that deal with young people's transition from education to work. As Peter Dwyer and Johanna Wyn (2001: 78) assert:
Relying on our own past…establishes a predetermined expectation about what happens in the lives of the next generation. It takes for granted a linear model of development which assumes that young people progress through a pre-set series of separate stages in their lives which involve innate processes of maturation and normative forms of socialization within stable families and an age-based education system, leading at the proper time to a movement from dependence to independence, from school to work, from young people's status as adolescents to their eventual achievement of a stable and secure adulthood.
This illustrates the point that the normative lag also translates into a policy gap between the ideology of increased educational participation and the persistent uncertainties of outcomes for the post-1970 generation (Dwyer and Wyn 2001: 74)—a gap, that is, that takes the linearity of a previous generation's transition to adulthood as the evaluative and policy-forming benchmark by which young people's successes and failures are judged. Thus there is good reason to rethink our notions of adulthood. Maguire et al. (2001: 198) make an uncommon (and therefore all the more pertinent) point: “The idea of a ‘refusal of adulthood’ potentially carries within it the notion that there is a ‘normal’ version of adulthood which (some) young people are rejecting. There are significant dangers in this interpretation. First, that those who are ‘refusers’ are in some ways deviant or ‘other’ and secondly, that there is a fixity in adult status.” These critical remarks are exceptions to the rule. Indeed, the largely uncritical manner in which the prevalent perspective is employed by social scientists means that often it simply mirrors the sentiments expressed in the media by marketing and advertising specialists. It is a relationship worth some consideration.
Adulthood, Common Sense, and Sociology
When Theodor W. Adorno remarked on the interdependence of what he called “prescientific thinking” and sociology, he insisted that the former is to be taken seriously: “Unless prescientific interests or extra-scientific concepts are imported into every scientific sociological investigation, then scientific interests and concepts are entirely lacking as well” (2000: 126). Indeed, as Bauman (1990: 10) notes, there is a “special relationship between sociology and common sense.” The discipline relies on common sense knowledge as the starting point to analysis. With the help of disciplinary epistemology, or perhaps simply with trained intuition, sociologists defamiliarize the familiar, taken-for-granted assumptions of everyday life and build “second order typifications” (Schütz 1954), theoretical concepts that stand apart from common sense. They build concepts and theories out of the material they find, observe, and study. However, it is not methodologically desirable to privilege common sense above abstraction: “Some historians and sociologists still believe that they can do without conceptual tools altogether and rely exclusively on what they think is plain common sense. But ‘common sense’ consists of nothing more or less than the abstract concepts and models wrapped up in conventional ways of saying things; as a result, commonsense commentators simply deprive themselves of any possibility of a critical understanding of their own conceptual tools” (Todorov 2003: 7).
Giddens (1984) attempts to reconcile these perspectives. His “double hermeneutic” aims to address the fact that social scientific interpretations of everyday constructs are reinterpreted and reassimilated into lay knowledge. In so doing, Giddens more than intimates that the quest for second-order typifications never ends. Applying these understandings to our analysis, the sociological notion of an allegedly prevalent delayed adulthood is the second-order typification of lay knowledge about “young
