Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty. Harry Blatterer

      “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