Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty. Harry Blatterer
adulthood as the culmination of a kind of maturity that Peter Berger ( 1966: 69) described as that “state of mind that has settled down, come to terms with the status quo, given up the wilder dreams of adventure and fulfillment.” This kind of view, of which Furedi's essay is but one articulation, illustrates how late-nineteenth-century ideas about young people (and prevailing normative notions of masculinity and adulthood) are still deployed in social-scientific analyses of present trends. And it does so with particular eloquence because its advocates, in all their earnestness, appear entirely oblivious of this very fact. Hans Peter Duerr's (1985: 126) assertion that one of the tasks of the scientist is to “mount a defence against that which is strange,” has some resonance here, if only as a possible unconscious motivation rather than full intention.
In fact, with this (unacknowledged but implied) model of adolescence in mind, proponents of the delayed adulthood thesis at times assert with some certainty when adolescence now ends and adulthood begins. Thus the U.S. National Academy of Sciences pegs the end of adolescence at 30 years of age (Danesi 2003: 104–5). The issue becomes positively confusing when, in a programmatic statement on professional confidentiality, members of the U.S. Society for Adolescent Medicine state, “[a]dolescents who are age 18 or older are adults” (Ford et al. 2004: 164). There is, in other words, no social-scientific consensus concerning the end of one period of life and the beginning of the next. There is agreement, however, that today young people take longer to reach full adulthood than was previously the case. Furstenberg (2000: 898) sums up the prevailing accord: “[T]he transition to adulthood extend[s] well into the third decade of life and is not completed by a substantial fraction of young people until their 30s.”
To accommodate the demographic changes that lie at the root of the allegedly protracted and delayed entry into adulthood in affluent societies, two conceptions of North American provenance have gained particular currency: Jeffrey J. Arnett's “emerging adulthood,” and “early adulthood,” a concept marshaled by a MacArthur Foundation research group into transitions to adulthood headed by Frank F. Furstenberg. Both perspectives are based on the belief that a new life stage separates adolescence from adulthood. Emerging adulthood pertains to individuals between 18 and approximately 25 years of age who, “[h]aving left the dependency of childhood and adolescence, and having not yet entered the enduring responsibilities that are normative in adulthood,” inhabit an in-between stage (Arnett 2000a: 469). Early adulthood describes a phase from the late teens to the late twenties or early thirties when “young people have not yet become fully adult because they are not ready or able to perform the full range of adult roles” (Furstenberg et al. 2003: i). According to Arnett (2000a: 471), terms such as “late adolescence,” “young adulthood,” and by implication “early adulthood,” should be avoided because emerging adults “do not see themselves as adolescents, but many of them also do not see themselves entirely as adults.” The main difference between these approaches, then, is one of nomenclature. In fact, the research agendas are eminently compatible both in terms of their respective subject areas and conclusions. They are erudite elaborations of the notion that the transition to adulthood is increasingly extended, and that thus entry into full adulthood occurs later than was previously the case—that the twixters, the kidults, and adultescents are on the rise.
Taken in sum, Arnett and Furstenberg et al.'s research output makes important contributions to the study of young people's experiences and the shifting normative frame in which they unfold. Be it the chronicling of social transformations in the United States since the Second World War; be it the subjective perceptions of the transition to adulthood (Arnett 1997) and the perceptions and attitudes of young people concerning their futures (Arnett 2000b); be it North Americans' views about the timing of life events that for them connote the transition to adulthood (Furstenberg et al. 2003; 2004): the combined findings are significant contributions to our understanding of subjective views and manifestations of social changes. But the validity and utility of data hinge ultimately on how they contribute to concept building, and how new concepts are put to use. This is particularly important when we attempt to describe and understand the experiences of young people, not least because policies informed by this kind of research have a very real and direct impact on young people. For this reason alone the prevailing view needs to be expanded. A first step is to point out some inherent misconceptions, not least because they underpin much of the work done in the area of “youth transitions.”
Epistemological Fallacy I: The Subjectivization of Everything
The aforementioned researchers have made invaluable contributions to our understanding of young people's perceptions of adolescence and the transition to adulthood, and perhaps none more so than Arnett. However, something is amiss in his interpretation of the data. Arnett connects what is considered a highly individualized Western culture directly to the alleged personalization of life stages. To this end the following statement may be considered programmatic not only for Arnett's approach, but for much of the oeuvre: “The more individualistic a culture becomes, the more the transition to adulthood is individually rather than socially defined. It takes place subjectively, individually, internally, in an individual's sense of having reached a state of self-sufficiency, emotional self-reliance, and behavioral self-control” (Arnett and Taber 1994: 533, original emphasis). This assertion fits hand in glove with Côté's (2000: 31 ) claim, “adulthood is now more a psychological state than a social status.” In fact, Côté's approach to the changing nature of adulthood is instructive here, and it is worth addressing, not least because of his recent collaboration with Arnett (Schwartz et al. 2005)—a quasi-natural affiliation considering their respective approaches. Central to Côté's view on identity formation in emerging adulthood is what he calls “two developmental routes in the individualization process” (Schwartz et al. 2005). As he previously elaborated in Arrested Adulthood (2000), Côté distinguishes between passive “default individualization” and active “developmental individualization” in his analysis of people's orientations concerning their life trajectories.9 Consumer-corporate interests are said to perpetuate and benefit from the default option; pop culture thrives on the illusory notion that individuality is a function of “selecting the right wardrobe or developing slight affectations in speech, behavior or appearance” (2000: 34). An increasing number of adults are seen as taking “paths of least resistance” rather than acquiring “self-discipline, in order to develop advanced skills, aptitudes, and attitudes” (2000: 34). Drawing on his notion of “identity capital,” Côté suggests that individuals need to become successful investors in the identity market in order to reach their potentials despite the machinations of a media-driven pop culture.
While both Arnett and Côté have succeeded in highlighting young people's potential for agency, objections can be raised. Their focus on individual perception and individual agency/passivity psychologizes the meaning of adulthood. This renders the young people under scrutiny agents of their own fate to such an overdrawn extent that the systemic factors that influence their practices all but disappear from view, except to provide obligatory variables. Practitioners in the sociology of youth have shown that today young people are under great pressure to succeed at a time when structural adjustments have softened up the foundations on which they are to build their lives, and that they often do so believing themselves to be solely responsible for their successes and failures (Furlong and Cartmel 1997; McDonald 1999; Wyn and White 2000; Dwyer and Wyn 2001). This blindness to systemic conditions on individuals' behalf has been called “the epistemological fallacy of late modernity” (Furlong and Cartmel 1997). Precisely this fallacy is discursively reproduced and social-scientifically legitimated by the orthodox, highly individualistic approach to adulthood.
Epistemological Fallacy II: The Normative Lag
The prevailing pronouncements about young people's practices have one thing in common: they implicitly use the model of standard adulthood as their benchmark. Wagner and Hayes's (2005: 4) considerations are instructive in this regard: “Our present-day thinking is based on a succession of historically evolved mentalities; on mental edifices which previous generations have constructed, pulled down, renovated and extended. Past events are compressed in images and metaphors which determine our present thinking even if we are not always aware of them.” Standard adulthood, a commonsense life stage in the “thickly viscous form of the past” (Wagner and Hayes 2005: 4), remains conceptually fixed,