Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty

Harry Blatterer

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781845456283, 9781845452858
• eBook ISBN: 9780857455314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the "storm and stress" period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the sociology of youth and the sociology of the life course as well as in the policy arena. At the same time, adulthood itself remains unarticulated; journey's end remains conceptually fixed and theoretically uncontested. Adulthood, then, is both central to the social imagination and neglected as an area of sociological investigation, something that has been noted by sociologists over the last four decades. Going beyond the overwhelmingly psychological literature, this book draws on original qualitative research and theories of social recognition and thus presents a first step towards filling an important gap in our understanding of the meaning of adulthood.

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 Jordan (1978) stresses that this was linked to the increasing fashionableness of the notion of psychological maturity, which at that time began to develop into a metaphor for adult status. Jordan identifies as crucial to the emergence of the mature individual qua adult the transformation of Calvinist predes-tinarianism into a theology that emphasized individual effort as the means to salvation: “Only when the individual's own struggles were given far greater weight in the process of conversion would there be room for a process of reaching psychological maturity” (1978: 190). So, the emergence of adulthood is inextricably linked to processes of individualization, that is, individuals' gradual liberation from the determinants of birth and religious conformity, and their simultaneous charging with an ever-increasing self-responsibility for all aspects of their lives.

Toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century adulthood became the default position: a life stage situated between adolescence and old age. G. Stanley Hall's (1904) work on adolescence was pivotal in this regard. Hall's thought was influenced by post-Darwinian evolutionary biology. His work was an important precursor to developmental psychology, which, particularly in its early to mid-twentieth-century form, set about segmenting the life course into discrete and well-defined units. It followed that adolescence, which was ever more perceived and treated as a period of inner turmoil, came to denote a preparatory life stage to adulthood, now understood as its developmental goal.

Earlier, in preindustrial Europe for example, children took on adult responsibilities at a young age by today's standards. For some sectors of society at least, participation in productive work tended to extend across almost all of the life span. Furthermore, the combination of early family formation, short life expectancy, and high fertility rates meant that parenthood too was a lifelong endeavor for most. As Hareven (1978: 205) puts it, “demographic, social and cultural factors combined to produce only minimal differentiation in the stages of life.” Moreover, the separation of young people from the world of production through universal education, while exclusion from work was also replicated at the other end of the life course, played an important role in the emergence of adulthood as a separately conceived life phase (Pilcher 1995).

Adulthood emerged in public consciousness and entered the cultural vocabulary of everyday life as the achievable (and indeed desirable) end to adolescent immaturity during the Second World War. In the U.S. a fascination with being grown up emerged in popular culture. Reader's Digest, McCall's, and Vital Speeches of the Day were some of the publications with a wide readership that concerned themselves with what it meant to be adult. A 1952 issue of Reader's Digest, for example, invited young readers to complete a quiz in order to find out whether or not they were indeed grown up (Jordan 1978: 197). So, since its entry into the vernacular during the Civil War, adulthood had come to signify something solid to aim for, a life stage that held the promise of fulfilled wishes and achieved aspirations. Accordingly, a number of words, phrases, and practices associated with adulthood as social status began to settle and eventually became taken for granted and commonplace. Directives like “Don't be childish!” and “Grow up!” and turns of phrase such as being “set in your ways” or having “settled down,” are linguistic devices associated with adulthood. They are also figures of speech that enact social asymmetries and put adult “human beings” in a more powerful position vis-à-vis those who, like children, are perceived and treated as “human becomings” (Qvortrup 1994).

“Maturity” acts as a central metaphor encompassing normative achievements and attributes of adulthood. Although the term is most closely associated with biological development, maturity tends to be used to describe individuals' social and psychological competencies and dispositions. While being mature does not necessarily make a person an adult in the eyes of others (a child may be “mature for her age,” just as an adult may be deemed immature), when linked to adulthood, maturity denotes an end state to biological, psychological, and social development. The notion of social maturity adds an extra dimension. It takes as its starting point the premise that adulthood is constituted not so much by the significance individuals attribute to their own attitudes and actions, but by the kinds of social validation these attract. Just as the interpretation of biological and psychological maturity is culturally specific, as Margaret Mead's classic work Coming of Age in Samoa ( 1928) has shown, maturity is subject to socially constructed and acknowledged forms of meaning. Its plural meanings (biological, psychological, and social) are, for example, institutionalized in law. To appropriate the thinking behind James and Prout's (1997) social constructivist stance on childhood: the maturity of adults is a biological fact of life, but the ways in which this maturity is understood and made meaningful is a fact of culture.¹

Notions of maturity hold an important place in the self-understanding of entire societies that share the liberal European tradition. The obvious example here is Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) statement, “Enlightenment is humankind's emergence from self-incurred immaturity” (1975 [1784]). In his critical analysis of this text, Michel Foucault spells out the synonymy between history and individual development. He maintains that Kant defines the historical process “as humanity's passage to its adult status,” to “maturity” (1994: 308–9, 318). Similarly, historian Norman Davies comments, “Europeans reached the ‘age of discretion’…with medieval Christendom seen as the parent and Europe's secular culture as a growing child conceived in the Renaissance” (Davies 1996: 596). Common perspectives of human development from a state of childlike dependence to adult independence parallel our understanding of modernization as a process of emancipation from dogma, tradition, and authority. This direct link between historical process and individual maturation has consequences for the social-scientific appraisal and treatment of young people to this day. The clearest case, again, is Hall's early interpretation of adolescence, where the individual's development was said to recapitulate the historical maturation of the human species as a whole. Along with a new emphasis on personal and social development, certain practices emerged as symbolic and constitutive of adulthood.

Adult Practices

Picture this: a man and a woman in their mid-twenties. The woman holds a baby in her arms; a small child clings to the man's hand. The woman wears an apron, the man his work overalls. A “Sold” sign perches on the fence that surrounds the freshly painted house. A generously sized car sits in the driveway. No one could ever mistake the man and woman in this romanticized picture for adolescents, and few would be tempted to suggest that they were not adults. Many would, as if by reflex, assume the man to be husband to the woman and father to the child. But something about this image jars against the present. Just like the choice of frame for a painting or a photo, so the right time frame too helps integrate representation and reception. With this in mind, I suggest that no period in the history of Western societies has been more conducive to the institutionalization of a particular model of adulthood (of which the above, romanticized image is one possible representation) than the era historian Eric Hobsbawm (1995) has called the “Golden Age,” namely the time between the end of the Second World War and the oil crises of the early 1970s. No period has provided more favorable conditions for this model to become lived experience for a majority; no period has shown a more faultless synthesis of ideal and reality. Following Lee (2001), I call this synthetic construct “standard adulthood.”

After the Second World War the industrialized economies experienced unprecedented affluence and stability. The period from about 1945 to the early 1970s saw a concerted effort by business, government, and unions to prevent a recurrence of the Depression, the harrowing experience of which still haunted decision makers. Although more wealthy nations had their own macroeconomic agenda, public spending, full employment, and universal social security provisions were given priority to ensure internal demand and hence economic expansion. The then-prevailing mode of management and organization, what came to be known as Fordism, has since come to denote more than that: it signifies a once-prevalent “total way of life” that congealed around goals of long-term stability and economic growth (Harvey 1989: 135). Typically, businesses valued employee loyalty, which was generally rewarded with promotions in hierarchically constituted organizations. For employees and families this meant that there were plannable career paths with predictable milestones on the way, and a known destination: retirement on guaranteed government pensions. In the world of work the accumulation of experience with age was viewed as a valuable asset and was seen to increase, rather than inhibit, job security (Lee 2001: ii-13). According to one sociologist's interpretation of the time—characteristically exaggerated for illustrative purposes—these economic and work-related aspects alone, “created a society in which people's lives were as highly standardized as the sheet steel from which the cars were welded together” (Beck 2000: 68).

These social conditions corresponded to a value system that remained unchallenged in its normative validity until the rising discontent of the 1960s. Open same-sex relationships were extremely risqué and hence rare, and same-sex parenthood (as opposed to guardianship) was unimaginable. The heterosexual nuclear family prevailed as the ideal. It is during this time that early marriage and family formation came to be lived experience for many adults.² Add to this the opportunities provided by the labor market, and a picture emerges that one commentator draws with clarity:

[O]nce ‘adult’ and employed, one could expect to stay ‘the same’ for the rest of one's life in a range of ways; one's identity was stabilized by sharing the work environment with more or less the same people throughout one's working life; the geographical area one lived in would remain the same since the organization one belonged to had set down firm roots in that area; and, even if one were dissatisfied with one's job, one would not have to seek a position with another organization (in another place with different people) because time and effort would bring the reward of career progression. (Lee 2001: 12–13)

Flexibility—first a buzzword in the New Capitalism (Sennett 1998, 2006) and now a taken for granted imperative in all social relations—was as yet a far-off reality. Becoming adult was a matter of following a life course that resembled a veritable march through the institutions of marriage, parenthood, and work. By today's standards these objective markers of adulthood were relatively fixed, achievable, and supported by an overarching value consensus. There was a high degree of fit between norms and social practice. Sharply delineated structures of opportunity rested on culturally and socially reproduced normative foundations that were, for a time, rarely questioned. With fulltime long-term work within reach for a majority, and with early marriage and family formation so common, what being grown up meant was clear. The fulfillment of the classic markers of adulthood (family, stable relationships, work, and independent living) brought in its wake the social recognition necessary for adult status to become a meaningful achievement. The experience of affluence and stability after the Second World War thus added its share of securities to the vision of standard adulthood, a now crystallized social representation.

Not all was well in the Golden Age, however. For one, growing up as a member of the postwar generation in the West was to live a contradiction. The Cold War meant that the new reality of increased chances for social mobility and relative affluence, and the belief in continuing economic and technological advance, was checked by the knowledge that the possibility of total annihilation was just as real. For example, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 served as a stark reminder of tragic possibilities.³ The lived contradiction of threat and opportunity underpinned one of the so-called “baby boomer” generation's defining mottos: “We're not here for a long time, we're here for a good time” (Mackay 1997: 62). As we shall see in chapter 4, this attitude marks an ideological transformation in the meaning of youth that was to reverberate decades into the future and that significantly altered the meaning of adulthood.

My schematic equation—economic stability plus an explicitly sanctioned normative consensus equals a stable adult identity—is not intended to be positive nostalgia.⁴ After all, standard adulthood was highly gendered in an era when the labor market overwhelmingly favored men as breadwinners. It would also be a gross historical misrepresentation were this image to be generalized to include marginalized groups. The kind of stability and predictability of life suggested by this model of adulthood is based primarily upon the experiences of white, heterosexual, middle-class males; on experiences, that is, that were lived in mainstream families and reproduced in mainstream culture, whatever the extant inequalities. The crux of the matter is this: the real differences did not diminish standard adulthood's normative status as the ultimate benchmark for adult maturity. Our contemporary associations of adulthood with stability arose from that generation's experiences and expectations.

Today standard adulthood as a norm remains robust, though it may be increasingly counterfactual for many. It is still associated with the ideals of stable relationships, stable work and income, a family of one's own, and independent living (Furstenberg et al. 2003; 2004). Framed in the language of a specific kind of maturity, standard adulthood promises greater self-understanding and the self-confidence that comes with the accumulation of social competencies. In these terms, settling down is not to be shunned. When the experience of opportunity, possibility, and stability is passed from one generation to the next and is focused in a notion such as adulthood, it stands to reason that this cultural idea should become a powerful ideal.

Classic Markers of Adulthood

The achievement of adult status has to do with “sets of practical accomplishments, and repertoires of behaviour” (Pilcher 1995: 86). This is particularly necessary in modern societies due to the absence of all-encompassing, firmly instituted rites of passage to adulthood. Thus there are various signposts that serve to identify and acknowledge individuals as adults, such as age, independent living, stable relationships, parenthood, stable employment, and the right to vote, to name a few. The descriptors of adulthood discussed below are limited to those objective markers of adulthood that have long standing salience as achievements that are deeply embedded in dynamics of social recognition. As ideal-typical yardsticks for commonsense and social scientific judgments regarding individuals' status, these classic markers are the tangibles of standard adulthood.

Marriage with its ritualistic inauguration is one such instance. It is ingrained in the social imaginary and as such most closely approximates a transition ritual from adolescence to adulthood. Through marriage people enter into a union underwritten by a t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Exploring Adulthood
• 1 - Representations of Adulthood
• 2 - Adulthood, Individualization, and the Life Course
• 3 - Adulthood and Social Recognition
• 4 - From Adulthood as a Goal to Youth as a Value
• 5 - New Adult Voices I: The Meaning of Adulthood
• 6 - New Adult Voices II: Without a Center that Holds
• 7 - Conclusion: Redefining Adulthood
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index