has its conceptual origins in common sense, “that rich yet disorganized, non-systematic, often inarticulate and ineffable knowledge we use to conduct our daily business of life” (Bauman 1990: 8).
While sociology rarely concerns itself with an analysis of adulthood as a social category, adult behavior and adulthood as a life stage are implicit in all sociological analyses. From the minutiae of everyday life to the macro processes of globalization; from ethnomethodology to systems theory; from the sociology of knowledge to critical theory to the cultural turn; the actor—whether conceived as individual, as decentered subject, or as system—is an embodiment of adultness. Even when sociologists are explicitly concerned with childhood, adolescence, youth, or old age, adulthood is always present as a point of reference. The adult represents the actor par excellence as the object of the majority of sociological investigations as if, in Norbert Elias's (1978: 248) words, he or she “was never a child and seemingly came into the world as an adult.” Thus, adulthood is both undertheorized as a phase of life and taken for granted as a default category and heuristic concept that grounds all manner of analysis. It is as neglected by sociologists as it is ever-present and central to what they do.
The term “practical consciousness,” which Giddens (1984)—borrowing from Marx and modifying Schütz's concept of “the natural attitude”—has used in his theoretical work, is useful in this respect. Practical consciousness refers to that prereflexive, intersubjectively constructed stance toward the world that enables individuals to pursue daily life. It is the unarticulated background knowledge that reduces the complexity of everyday interactions largely through their routinization. Elsewhere Giddens further emphasizes the existential centrality of the practical consciousness as “the cognitive and emotive anchor of the feelings of ontological security characteristic of large segments of human activity in all cultures” (1991: 36). Practical consciousness thus refers to a shared repertoire of meanings that confers a measure of predictability on social life and furnishes actors with a stability of reference. Note that sociologists inhabit a practical consciousness other than that which they share with others in their professional field: they are also lay participants in the everyday interactions of the lifeworld. “However hard they might try, sociologists are bound to remain on both sides of the experience they strive to interpret, inside and outside at the same time” (Bauman 1990: 10). They are both subject to and progenitors of commonsense assumptions and second-order typifications. Because of their vocation and the relationship between sociology and common sense, sociologists cannot strictly separate their professional from their everyday practical consciousness. There is therefore considerable overlap between the natural attitudes required in both terrains.
Sociologists are also adults. They have their own memories of childhood, which, like others, they may nostalgically reconstruct; they have their ideas as to what growing up means to them; and it is their own adulthood they embody in the present as the place from where coming of age—their own as well as others'—can be viewed from some distance. As such, adulthood is perhaps for most of us an unproblematic notion. It is not only central and marginal to the discipline, but it is also central and marginal to all adults: central to who they are, and marginal because it is an unobserved part of their identities. The overlap in sociologists' stance toward adulthood as an experiential fact of life and as a disciplinary given contributes to the paradoxical status of adulthood in sociology. Ultimately, it is this paradoxical quality of adulthood as a social representation, its simultaneous centrality and marginality in everyday life, media discourse, and social scientific perspectives that makes it such a rich area of social inquiry.
2
ADULTHOOD, INDIVIDUALIZATION, AND THE LIFE COURSE
“Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.”
Mark Twain, Letter to Edward Dimmitt (1901)
The self-aware and autonomous individual is central to the self-understanding of modern societies. In the European imagination its emergence is commonly traced to the Renaissance, when individual identity is said to replace collective identity as the center of subjectivity.1 With the development of the “ideal of authenticity” around the eighteenth century the subject becomes the full-fledged individual in the modern sense (Taylor 1991: 28). In opposition to those who see the ability to separate right from wrong as a matter of rational calculation, the self is now linked to the belief that human beings have an inherent sense of morality. Charles Taylor (1991) suggests that this moral moment becomes displaced, and authenticity disengaged from its ethical horizons becomes an end in itself. These developments go hand in hand with an increasing freedom of self-determination in fact and as a promise. The promise of freedom remains only partially redeemed. Envisaged by Kant as “humankind's emergence from self-incurred immaturity,” on another level it also delivered its opposite: “Standards started to shift, and then there were many of them. The authority of each one came to be cast in doubt, ridiculed or otherwise sapped by another, finding its own indignance reciprocated. A yawning hollowness now spread where once was a centre that held the world, and all its segments, in place” (Bauman 1995: 146).
This “disenchanted” world, as Weber (1992) called it, signaled the emergence of a new imperative: to wrest meaning from existence without the comfort and hope that the belief in a realm beyond the mundane can bring. At the same time the mental security based on “knowing one's station” was traded in for the uncertainties that comprise the other side of relatively greater autonomy. And this all the more so because the world in which we needed to make our own way increased dramatically in scope. As local ties were loosened and state centralization increased, protection and control functions were taken over by the nation-state as a new identity-conferring entity (Elias 1999). Today, in light of the globalization of social relations this abstract scheme of reference has gained in intangibility. Our ethical and moral sense draws on a frame of reference that is unfathomable in its totality, and it is within this context that biographies have become the individual's responsibility to an unprecedented extent. This theme is central to my analysis of contemporary adult lives and bears some further consideration.
Contemporary Individualization
Ulrich Beck's observations of present and emerging forms of sociation are far ranging: changes in the structure of the family and work; the continuing rapprochement of the sexes; the demise of anthropocentrism amid the recognition of ecological risks; and the emergence of issue-based politics and the decline of traditional forms of political affiliation and action. These are all transformations that according to Beck spell the departure of past attitudes, actions, and social life forms. He contends, however, that far from cutting the individual loose from social exigencies, these transformations have chiefly served to reembed subjects in more complex institutional arrangements that demand from them a heightened self-awareness of their biographical trajectories.
The freedom gained by individuals released from traditional social bonds requires that they lead their own lives without the securities of old. While institutional arrangements necessary for society's continuity and reproduction continue to exist, they have to be chosen and prioritized by individuals themselves. This, then, is an “institutionalized individualism” in the manner described by Talcott Parsons with all its ambiguities intact (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 163). Jürgen Habermas (1992: 149) too explains this phenomenon succinctly: “On the one hand the person is supposed to achieve greater freedom of choice and autonomy in proportion to his individuation; on the other hand, this extension of the degree of freedom is described deterministically.” Bauman (2001a: 9) gets to the heart of the reigning cultural vision:
The distinctive feature of the stories told in our times is that they articulate individual lives in a way that excludes or suppresses (prevents from articulation) the possibility
