Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty. Harry Blatterer
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 What is more, the outdated model is often held up as something to be striven for at a time when the realization of standard adulthood is for many not only impossible, but also hardly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 people who refuse to grow up.” As a second-order typification it 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