Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty. Harry Blatterer
in the meaning of a word by focusing attention on the practices and perceptions that underpin its social manifestations.
Approach and Method
I explore ways in which adulthood can be adequately conceptualized against the background of current forms of social life. I do not argue against psychologically oriented approaches, but seek to draw attention to the need for a complementary, sociological perspective from which social trends can be viewed in a larger context, and in a different light. To this end, my approach is to consider modalities of social integration in a time of advanced individualization and to reveal the affinities between culture and individuals' practices. Because little has been written about adulthood from a social-theoretical perspective, this study is skewed toward theory building. But even where the book is at its most abstract and ostensibly at considerable distance from social reality, its questions and considerations are always cast against the background of lived experience. It thus pays attention to the principal protagonists—“new adults”—throughout.3 That is, even though their voices are heard in two specific chapters only, the active progenitors of change are present from the first page to the last. This fact, I hope, makes for good theory and thus also for good reading.
My interpretation of qualitative data is the result of conversations with twelve individuals. These conversations do not aim at the kind of scope that representative, enumerative studies may provide, but at depth (Crouch and McKenzie 2006). That is to say, I seek to identify perceptions, experiences, and attitudes in order to gain insights into contemporary adulthood as lived experience. The respondents' stories are invaluable guideposts toward a better understanding of a research area particularly when, as in the present case, that area is relatively underexplored. One of the very valuable aspects to “the logic of small samples in qualitative research” is that earlier conversations remain present as a frame of reference while new material is being offered, allowing a continuous revisiting of one interview interpretation against others (Crouch and McKenzie 2006). And so, taken together, juxtaposed against one another, and projected against a conceptual background assembled through an intensive study of relevant scholarly and nonacademic materials, thematic strands emerge that help give shape to a picture of adulthood that challenges commonsense assumptions. As a theory-building project the book investigates emerging social trends rather than analyzing specific social situations in a given milieu.
The history I sketch, and from which I draw, is the history of economically advanced, pluralist, secular societies that share the liberal-democratic tradition. The adage “Western” is thus no more than a summary concept. In fact, many of the social trends discussed here are also social realities in societies that fall outside the boundaries of what is commonly understood by the term. If not on a nationwide basis, this nevertheless pertains to more affluent milieus inside less developed or developing countries. In light of current globalizing tendencies, Eduardo Galeano's (2000: 26) distinction of “global North” and “global South” is apposite here—and points to further research possibilities. My writing about the decades following the Second World War—the time when the common-sense model of adulthood came into its own—is in no way intended as a comprehensive, differentiated exegesis of the social conditions that framed growing up during that time. This would unnecessarily stretch the limits of this volume as well as the conceptual apparatus required to reveal the emerging redefinition of adulthood. Rather, I selectively highlight some widely researched key themes that lend themselves well to comparison.
Australia is where the research is situated; its social, political, and economic conditions frame the perceptions, views, and experiences of the interviewees and thus the conceptual innovations of the text as a whole. Yet, there are benefits to an international readership that flow from this very fact. The U.S. reader will be reminded of some salient national similarities: both Australia and the U.S. are relatively new settler societies; they are part of the same linguistic community; and they share the Common Law heritage of their respective justice systems. Further, having gone through thoroughgoing economic reforms from about the middle of the 1980s, Australia is, today, firmly in the grip of a neoliberal dispensation. Under the leadership of John Howard the country has moved ever closer to the U.S. in matters of environmental, economic, and foreign policy. Like many North Americans, many Australians are familiar with the “dark side of economic reform” (Pusey 2003), just as they are familiar with terrorism's real and imagined threats. The uncertainties with which this book deals have clear—and for that reason not always articulated—links to changes in the sociopolitical environment. For example, at the time of writing, the Australian Industrial Relations system is at the brink of a transformation that could well further undermine working people's ability to envisage a coherent, long-term biographical trajectory. This particularly affects young people. U.S. citizens are no strangers to these issues, and some Europeans would do well to learn advance lessons before their governments too embark on further economic deregulation, privatization, and the inexorable, near-total individualization of all of life's responsibilities. In other words, Australia is both a typical and an extraordinary case, and as such it is well placed to give clues to an increasingly global redefinition of contemporary adulthood.
Structure of the Book
The volume proceeds from the discussion of general, conceptual questions to an exploration of personal experiences. How is adulthood culturally represented? What is the productive connection between our commonsense understanding of adulthood and its social scientific representations? What is the relationship between age norms, notions of maturity, and adulthood? How is the prevailing model of adulthood deployed in current perspectives on contemporary young adults, and how is it reproduced? These are some of the questions addressed in chapter 1. Their elaboration leads to a critique of a current orthodoxy, which I term the “delayed adulthood thesis.” It examines the image of adulthood this approach uses, and by situating it in its historical context sets the scene for an alternative conceptualization developed in subsequent chapters.
The burdens as well as the opportunities of choosing from a plethora of seemingly proliferating options in what has been called “individualized society” (Bauman 2001a) and the imperative to turn one's life into a project are central moments of contemporary modernity which affect the transformation of adulthood. Chapter 2 shows that negotiating these contingencies means, in practice, to negotiate some fundamental shifts in the contemporary life course. Biographies are losing footholds of old; temporal guarantees of long standing are diminishing; uncertainty is becoming normalized, particularly for a generation that has known no different. This chapter brings into focus some of the most salient aspects of the social conditions that frame our understanding as well as the experiences of contemporary adulthood.
The 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