following chapters are dedicated to a reconceptualization of adulthood that encompasses the social changes of the recent past as well as emerging forms of sociability. Adhering to a perspective that sees self-perception of one's adult or nonadult status as ultimately socially grounded, I elaborate this point in chapter 3 by way of Axel Honneth's theory of social recognition. Here I address our cultural association of adulthood with full personhood.This semantic cannot, however, be divorced from shifts in Western perceptions of youth—an idea that is at least as difficult to make tangible as the idea of adulthood. Youth is sometimes vaguely circumscribed as a desirable attribute, sometimes precisely delimited as a phase of life for statistical purposes. Chapter 4 discusses youth in terms of an ideology in the broad sense of the word. I trace the historical transformation and the subsequent expansion of youth as an ideal across the life course, and I connect this with dynamics of social recognition that are specific to advanced capitalist societies.
This study is an exploration of the redefinition of social norms. At the same time it is a study in social recognition. To be sure, the emergence of new norms and the changing relations of recognition are inseparable from one another. These processes unfold as a consequence of people's ordinary, everyday actions. There is perhaps no better way to illuminate changes in society than to ask those who are most directly implicated in these changes. Thus, chapters 5 and 6 turn to the experience of contemporary adulthood. I analyze material gathered in interviews in order to fathom how the respondents configure their adulthood today; how they negotiate a fragmented life course; how they deal with an all-pervasive uncertainty. By way of summary, I conclude with reflections concerning the affinities between social conditions and contemporary adulthood in the final chapter.
To seek to grasp the here and now—with one eye on the past and the other on the future, while the present shifts underfoot—is something that by its very nature can never be completely mastered. In this endeavor I have taken my lead from Zygmunt Bauman (2001a: 13), who reminds us that “close engagement with the ongoing effort to rearticulate the changing human condition under which the ‘increasingly individualized individuals’ find themselves as they struggle to invest sense and purpose in their lives is…the paramount task of sociology.” This, then, is an effort to do justice to that vision and to the promise it contains.
1
REPRESENTATIONS OF ADULTHOOD
“What is called the common-sense view is actually the grown-up view taken for granted.”
Peter Berger, An Invitation to Sociology (1963)
Bent on proving the value and validity of sociology as a scientific discipline, and critiquing the psychology of his day to make his point, Emile Durkheim used the term “collective representations” to describe the social a priori of ideas. Relatively fixed, even time honored, myths, legends, religious beliefs, and moral sentiments have in Durkheim's conception a strongly constraining and integrating function. Taking his lead from the venerable pioneer, contemporary French social psychologist Serge Moscovici has coined the term “social representations.” In La Psychoanalyse, son image et son public he offers this explanation:
Social representations are almost tangible entities. They circulate, intersect and crystallize continuously, through a word, a gesture, or a meeting in our daily world. They impregnate most of our established social relations, the objects we produce or consume, and the communications we exchange. We know that they correspond, on one hand, to the symbolic substance which enters into their elaboration, and on the other to the practice which produces this substance, much as science or myth corresponds to a scientific or mythical practice. (quoted in Duveen 2000: 3)
Unlike Durkheim's collective representations, which appear like an impenetrable layer of sundry sentiments, emotions, and beliefs, Moscovici emphasizes the mutability and plasticity of commonly held ideas, not least because social representations are intersubjectively constituted through verbal and nonverbal communication. In turn, as embodiments of our collectively held ideas, they orient our practices. Not unlike Durkheim's (1966) axiom that social facts are things sui generis, Moscovici proposes, “to consider as a phenomenon what was previously seen as a concept” (2000: 30, original emphasis). It is in Moscovici's sense that adulthood can be usefully considered a social representation.
Adulthood is circumscribed by historically and culturally specific practices and expectations, achievements, and competencies. It is fixed in our minds as childhood's other, and as adolescence's not-yet-attained destination. More than a concept, and testimony to the power of ideas, this social representation enacts differences: the child and adolescent are cast as dependent on adults. To better grasp adulthood as a social representation, let us imagine that it was struck from the imagination. Beyond the nonexistence of a mere sound, a range of associated concepts and ideas would be divested of their present meaning. What are childhood and adolescence without their counterpart and goal? How would we understand maturity and autonomy? The evaluative potency of adulthood (its taken-for-granted centrality in the apportioning of power) would be missing, replaced perhaps by other concepts conjured up by collective practices and ideas. This illustrates “the curious position” of social representations “somewhere between concepts, which have as their goal abstracting meaning from the world and introducing order into it, and percepts, which reproduce the world in a meaningful way” (Moscovici 2000: 31).
As part of the social constitution of adulthood, everyday communication and social scientific discourse feed off each other and reproduce the cluster of meanings and representations with which the word adulthood has become associated over time. In fact, it is of fairly recent provenance as a word, and of even more recent pedigree as a commonsense concept and social phenomenon. Still, the meaning of ideas, concepts, and social phenomena changes along with large-scale social transformations. Today, demographic and cultural transformations that originate in the post-Second World War decades are forcing apart ideas about adulthood and the practices that produce its substance. The emerging cleavage is manifest in a normative lag between commonsense and social scientific discourse, and the practical redefinition of adulthood on the ground. This is a central argument of the book. Thus it is worth exploring adulthood and its emergence as a concept, its transmutation into and consolidation as a social representation, as well as the present dilemmas these changes pose for social scientists in general and sociologists in particular. On the whole this task has a twofold aim: to elucidate the interaction between commonsense and social scientific knowledge in the formation of our cultural vision of adulthood, and to address how this conception is used in approaches to new adults' practices and orientations.
A Brief History of Adulthood and Maturity
The word adulthood, denoting a stage of life, is a relatively recent addition to the English lexicon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, usage of the noun was preceded by the adjective “adult,” which entered the vocabulary via the adoption of the French adulte, itself a sixteenth-century adaptation of the Latin adolescere, to grow up. “Adultness” is said to have come into usage mid-eighteenth-century, and was superseded around 1870 by “adulthood.” The Shakespearian scholar Charles Cowden Clarke (1787–1877) is credited with using the term for the first time in a literary work. Writing about Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, he noted that the play “was written in the full vigour and adulthood of his [Shakespeare's] conformation” (OED 1989: 178–180).
Some time passed, however, before the social meaning of adulthood was to gain normative efficacy. Preindustrial Western cultures did not know adulthood as a defined social category: “You were a man or a woman if you weren't a child” (Merser 1987: 52). In the United States the term came into circulation after the Civil War and reached prominence no sooner than the early twentieth century. Winthrop
