‘Constructing Adulthood’: Agency and Subjectivity in the Transition to Adulthood

‘CONSTRUCTING ADULTHOOD’:

AGENCY AND SUBJECTIVITY IN

THE TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD

Ross Macmillan

ABSTRACT

Agency and subjectivity are key factors that shape the life course. Agency is

widely regarded as a central concept in life course study and has been the

object of considerable research. Still, the meaning of agency, its specific

expression in the life course, its relationship to social structure, and the role

of chance and contingency remain problematic issues. In contrast, subjec-

tive perceptions of life stage, specifically age-graded self-identity, have re-

ceived comparatively little attention. It is only recently that the idea of

studying the nature of such perceptions and factors that produce them has

emerged as a coherent field of study. This introductory chapter seeks to

map out the key issues confronting life course social sciences with a specific

focus on the transition to adulthood and outline the theoretical and em-

pirical contributions of the various chapters. It begins with an overview of

issues of agency in the social sciences, its role in life course social theory,

and a discussion of the ways in which the chapters in this volume advance

our thinking about agency in the life course. This is followed by an overview

of the treatment of subjectivity and self-identity in the life course, an out-

lining of the key debates over ‘‘emerging adulthood,’’ and a discussion of

the contributions of the various chapters. A short conclusion outlines the

Constructing Adulthood: Agency and Subjectivity in Adolescence and Adulthood

Advances in Life Course Research, Volume 11, 3–29

Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1040-2608/doi:10.1016/S1040-2608(06)11001-1

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broader implications of the various works and how they may further the-

oretical and empirical work on the life course.

The study of the life course has historically followed two reasonably distincttracks. In one, social demographers have studied populations and mappedout the nature of role entries and role exits and their relationship to personalattributes and social conditions. In the other, social psychologists havesought to identify the nature of social roles, social relations, and socialexperiences of both macro- and micro-events and their role in shaping lifecourse fortunes over time. The purpose of this volume is to extend the lattertradition with a specific focus on issues of agency and subjectivity in thetransition to adulthood.1 Although agency and subjectivity are inter-relatedphenomena, the various contributions to this volume typically target one orthe other in an effort to flesh out their meaning for those in their teens andearly 20 s who are contemplating and constructing their futures as ‘‘adults.’’

The idea that individuals both have and exercise human agency stands asone of the guiding principles of life course research. In delivering the Cooley–Mead lecture to the Social Psychology of the American Sociological Asso-ciation, Elder (1994) describes human agency as one of the four centralthemes in life course research. Likewise, the oft-expressed concern thatsocial scientists have over ‘‘selection bias’’ may be seen as little more than adesire to ignore agency through the selection and modification of life expe-riences (Hagan, 2001). Even recent theoretical statements on agency increas-ingly reference the importance of temporality and the long-lineage of agenticconsiderations in life course research (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998).

Although its status as central within life course perspectives is secure, thelarge role of agency in the social sciences is much less clear. Social theoristsfrequently write about the uneasy connection between social structure andagency (Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Hays, 1994; Sewell, 1992). Forsome, the goal is integration. Structure and agency are seen as part of adualism with agency both productive and reproductive of social structuresand social structures both enabling and constraining of social action (see forexample, Giddens, 1984). Others emphasize the distinctiveness, if not nec-essary distinctiveness, of social structure and agency (Craib, 1992; Swidler,1986). Still, others question the ontological importance of agency by high-lighting the utility of treating agency as a cultural attribution rather thanimportant aspect of human behavior (Fuchs, 2001; Meyer & Jepperson,2000). In the end, debate rages in both philosophical and empirical circles asto what, if anything, agency is, what role it plays in the human experience,

Constructing Adulthood 5

and the degree to which it meaningfully apprehends a capacity of individuals(or groups) to forge their own futures.

It is interesting to note, however, that the centrality of agency in lifecourse theory and research tends to underplay a full understanding of psy-chology and psychological orientations over the life span. Perhaps due tothe unnecessary disciplinary divides between developmental perspectivesrooted in psychology and life course-demographic studies located in Soci-ology (as well as other disciplines like Family Studies and History), lifecourse research is typically forward in orientation, concerned primarily withtying the past to the present and using psychological manifestations ofagency as the linking function. Missing from this is any systematic concernwith the actual experience of the life course, even though the intellectualorigins of life course studies, notably Thomas and Znaniecki (1927), havedirect links to symbolic interactionism (Mead, 1934; Stryker, 1980) and thelatter’s explicit concern with self and society as a subjectivity process thatunfolds dynamically over time.

It is these two issues that frame the current volume. The chapters includedcover a wide range of issues and intersect in interesting and important ways.For purposes of organization, they are divided into two sections. The firstcovers theoretical and empirical issues in the role of agency in the life course.These are complemented by a second set of chapters that focus on issues ofidentity and subjectivity in the transition to adulthood. The goal of thisintroductory chapter is to articulate the key issues and questions that or-ganized contemporary scholarship on agency and subjectivity in the lifecourse and locate the various chapters within such issues. It is hoped thatthis volume does as much to initiate further thinking and further inquiry onwhat Andrews and colleagues (this volume) call the ‘‘inner side’’ of thetransition to adulthood as it does to answer key questions, including bothagency and subjective identity.

AGENCY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

The notion of agency has an odd history in the social sciences. In manyregards, it has had limited visibility in social theory and limited role in socialresearch. Instead, it is the realm of philosophy where questions of agencyhave assumed center stage. As Emirbayer and Mische (1998) note, manycurrent conceptions of agency have long-standing ties to philosophicaldebates over rational versus normative explanations for action. Here, no-tions of philosophical individualisms characteristics of the Enlightenment

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gave rise to the idea of the autonomous actor. Through a lineage of thoughtfrom Locke through Smith, Bentham, and Mill, the notion of agency hasbeen firmly rooted in an ‘‘individualist and calculative conception of action’’(Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 965).

This latter conception of agency was however only one vision offered byEnlightenment thinkers. Rousseau, most notably, saw agency in the devel-opment of conscience and morality, particularly the idea of a self-regulatingmoral being. Kant later built upon this basis by arguing that freedom in-volved the normatively grounded individual who was not governed by ma-terial necessity or interest. Here, he emphasized the dynamic interplay of theconditional and the normative and, by implication, necessity and freedom(Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). In doing so, he elaborated the question of‘‘free will’’ versus ‘‘determinism’’ that continues to be the focal point ofsociological theory, including both classic theorists such as Talcott Parsons(1968) and contemporary thinkers such as James Coleman (1990) andJeffrey Alexander (1988); Alexander, Marx and Williams, 2004.

Even with this rich and important lineage, the way in which agencyappears in social science research is both quite ambiguous and quite var-iable. There are four main characters. First, agency is the soft sibling tostructure with the latter garnering the lion’s share of attention. For example,the important works of Giddens (1984, 1991), Bourdieu (1977), and Sewell(1992) begin with the central problem of social structure and how and why itis reproduced through the everyday activities of people. It is true that agencyis granted and referenced as a feature element of the overall story. Yet, it isequally true that what agency is and how it operates in everyday society isremarkably, but perhaps not surprisingly, underdeveloped.

A second character reflects this structuralist orientation but takes agency asthe product of social structure. While much of Foucault’s work falls into thisdomain, the theme resonates equally prominently among some importantAmerican social thinkers. For example, Fuchs’ (2001) provocatively titled ar-ticle Beyond Agency offers the thesis that agency is best used in the context of‘‘second-order observing.’’ Here, agency is nothing more than a conceptualdevice that different observers might use to perform different sorts of culturalwork. The key sticking point for Fuchs, and an issue we return to later, is thatindividuals simultaneously exist in both micro worlds and macro worlds and,while they may exert considerable influence and exercise extensive interpre-tation in the former, they ultimately have ‘‘little knowledge or control’’ overtheir macro worlds. In essence, this represents a more extreme version ofMarx’s oft-repeated dictum that men (sic) make history but not under con-ditions of their own choosing. In the end, agency for Fuchs is neither the


province of individuals nor collectives, but instead is a cultural tool that onecan use (or not use depending on the circumstance and objective) to makesense of a given set of actions.

A similar but more macro-historical perspective is offered by Meyer andJepperson (2000). For these authors, ‘‘Much social theory takes for grantedthe core conceit of modern culture, that modern actors—individuals, organ-

izations, nation states—are autochthonous and natural entities, no longer re-ally embedded in culture (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000, abstract) (emphasisadded).’’ In line with this thesis, their central argument is that modern,largely Western but increasingly global, cultural systems construct themodern actor as an authorized agent for a variety of interests. Here, the‘‘actorhood’’ of individuals, organizations, and nation states has deep ties toemergent notions of social agency that appeared with continuing religiousand post-religious evolution. As society moved from cultural emphasis ongods and natural forces, there emerged a ‘‘cultural devolution – from god tosociety, on to individuals and organizations’’ (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000,p. 101). As authorized agents for various interests, individuals engage in awide variety of enterprises with broad collective purposes. Here, the keyfocus of attention is on the cultural system, rather than the actor, and theways in which the cultural system constructs, indeed variably constructs,notions of agency, while simultaneously providing a frame or context, set ofrules as it may, that shapes expressions of agency. The resulting image of theactor is highly structural; she is characterized by a ‘‘high degree of tension[that] generates inconsistencies and contradictions (p. 110),’’ is ‘‘highlystandardized,’’ ‘‘scripted,’’ and ‘‘highly isomorphic’’ (p. 111), has ‘‘attitudesand opining [that is] disconnected from actual behavior’’ (p. 112), andultimately the ‘‘ongoing rationalization and expansion of social agency inmodern culture greatly heightens the overall structuration of modernactors’’ (p. 112). Clearly, the actor for Meyer and Jepperson is subordinateto the structural and cultural context that creates her.

A third model of agency is expressed in fields such as economics, psy-chology, and various strains of sociology. As an example, Gecas (2003,p. 369) argues that

‘‘The course of our lives is shaped by many forces and events, not the least of which by

our ourselves. For good and bad, we are to a large extent architects of our life course.

Within the constraints imposed by biology, history, social structure, good and bad

fortune, and other factors we may or may not be aware of, we try to control the direction

of our lives by exerting our will, pursuing our goals, and affecting our circumstances.

While we are indeed products of social and physical forces, we are also causal agents in

the construction of our environments and ourselves (emphasis added).’’

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While elaborating the many manifestations of agency that Gecas alludes tois beyond the scope of this chapter, its general tenets involve the inter-related ideas of expressions of self and social context and decision-makingwithin given social contexts. Key themes and concepts such as self-esteem,self-efficacy, locus of control, aspirations, expectations, and of late ‘‘planful-ness’’ or ‘‘planful competence’’ have featured prominently in research. Take,for example, the notion of self-efficacy. Bandura (1976, 1997) has articulateda sociocognitive theory of self-efficacy that views people as agentic, self-reflective, self-regulating, creative, and proactive. The essence of this is theprinciple that people believe in their causative and agentic capabilities. Inother words, self-efficacy reflects the principle that people see themselves asproductive and transformative entities in their environments, that they canand will exercise some control over the circumstances of their lives, and thatthey are capable of carrying out actions that will produce intended out-comes. In a different vein, notions of aspirations and expectations haveplayed central roles in various fields of sociological inquiry. As core ele-ments in the Wisconsin Model of Status Attainment (Sewell & Hauser, 1975),aspirations for educational (and occupational attainment) are seen as social– because of their reinforcement by peers and parents—and psychologicalengines of socioeconomic reproduction and social mobility. As a final ex-ample, the entire field of micro-economics is premised on various styles andcontexts of decision-making within given fields of exchange with the keyidea being that individuals exercise choices that shape consequences for theireveryday lives. While volumes could and have been written about all thevarious social psychological dimensions of agency, the following sectionfocuses on the role of agency in life course perspective.

AGENCY IN THE LIFE COURSE: THEORETICAL AND

EMPIRICAL ISSUES

In his Cooley–Mead lecture, Elder (1994) highlights human agency as one offour central themes of the life course paradigm. In doing so, he stressed theidea that the concepts of ‘‘actor’’ and of ‘‘human agency’’ have long-standingstature in the study of human lives. In particular, they featured prominently inThomas and Znaniecki (1927) study of the Polish Peasant in Europe in

America and their, at the time, unheeded call for the study of life histories.Much like Gecas quoted above, the key argument Elder offers is that indi-viduals ‘‘are planful and make choices among options that construct theirlives’’ (Elder, 1994, p. 6). In a later piece, Elder and colleagues note that


‘‘Children, adolescents, and adults are not passively acted upon by socialinfluences and structural constraints. Instead, they make choices and com-promises based on the alternatives that they perceive before them’’ (Elder,Johnson, & Crosnoe, 2003, p. 11). The key implication is that individualdifferences and actions do matter in the shaping of human lives.

It is of equal significance that the exercise of human agency is heavilyinfluenced by issues of temporality. On one hand, agency is continuallyexercised. Children make decisions about how they will react to family andfriends and exercise agency in the choice of activities and individuals theychoose to interact with (Corsaro, 2003). Likewise, adolescence, often per-ceived as a period of ‘‘storm and stress’’ (Hall, 1904), involves shiftinginfluences away from family and toward the peer group (Collins & Laursen,1999) and hence introduces an entire new arena of choice and array of op-tions. Finally, adulthood involves myriad decisions that give fundamentalform, as well as shape the meaning of the life course for individuals andsociety (Gerson, 1985). People make decisions if, when, and who to marry.They decided to extend their schooling or forgo this in favor of work andfamily. They choose jobs, choose to leave jobs, consider embarking on wholenew careers or lines of work. Separate from this, however, is the importantprinciple from developmental psychology that the timing of decision-makingmatters. Human agency and the decisions that result occur at varied stages ofthe life span and this has significant implications for the meaning and im-plications that they have. Clausen’s (1991) emphasis on ‘‘adolescent compe-tence’’ is often singled out as both a central facet of agency and one thathighlights the importance of timing of agentic action in the life span.

In many ways, the contributions to this volume both extend and developunderstanding of agency in the life course. To start, Hitlin and Elder com-bine a wide-ranging theoretical assessment with a creative operationaliza-tion to model agency in a large sample of adolescents. They begin with theoverarching view that agency is the ‘‘ability to exert influence on one’s life’’and then seek to articulate and organize its sub-dimensions. In contrast tosome prior work, including Clausen (1991), they argue that ‘‘planfulness’’ isless an indicator of agency and more an indicator of personality. They areequally skeptical of ‘‘self-efficacy’’ as this concept alone has little to do withreflexive evaluation of situations. Neither concept, they argue, ‘‘situates thesocial agent as aware of their socially structured life chances.’’ At the sametime, they view both concepts as useful dimensions of an agentic process andultimately offer a structural representation of their relationship. In doing so,they view ‘‘planfulness’’ as a determinant of agency (rather than a dimensionof it) and view agency as the conjoint presence of self-efficacy and optimism

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about the future. In this latter regard, they join concepts of capability with aforward-thinking perspective as a way to model agency as a life coursephenomenon. They further show that agency has important effects on bothnormative and deviant behavior. In doing so, they explicitly bring issues oftemporality to the fore, highlight the projective nature of agency (cf.,Emirbayer & Mische, 1998), and showcase the productive capacity ofagency to shape life course outcomes.

If Hitlin and Elder provide an example of a general operationalization ofagency, Zimmer-Gimbeck and Mortimer’s chapter emphasizes agency in adomain-specific manner, within the context of work lives and career for-mation. Using the example of career aspirations, they employ prospectivelongitudinal data to identify different types of career strategists. Their ty-pology consists of ‘‘over-selectors,’’ ‘‘under-selectors,’’ and ‘‘one changers’’that are differentiated based on the stability of aspirations between ages18 and 25 (i.e., ‘‘over-selectors’’ had stable aspirations at each point in timemeasured by desired occupation in later life; ‘‘under-selectors’’ change as-pirations frequently). To extend understanding of agentic processes in thetransition to adulthood, they further considered links between career aspi-rations and process of educational and occupational attainment in later life.Importantly, they find that both the ‘‘over-selection’’ and ‘‘one-change’’groups were somewhat advantaged in educational and career attainments.In the end, Zimmer-Gimbeck and Mortimer reveal the importance of goalsetting within given life domains as an important component of selection,compensation, and optimization of social opportunities over the life span.

While the works of Hitlin and Elder and Zimmer-Gimbeck and Mortimerhighlight different images of agency and their role in shaping life experi-ences, the issue of where dimensions of agency come from and thecomplicated ways they connect to the transition to adulthood in contem-porary society is not directly addressed. It is here that Aronson’s provoc-ative assessment of role models in the lives of contemporary women isparticularly insightful. The key questions here are whether women haveother women in their lives that provide scripts of the life course, what thesescripts look like, and how women make use of them in constructing theirown life paths. It is of some significance that the women Aronson inter-viewed reported having few role models, particularly people whose life pathsthey wanted to emulate. Instead, negative life models were much morecommon and several respondents felt that they really had no role models.The implications of this for understanding agency are twofold. First, agencyis not simply about repeating scripts of the past or of others but also takesthe form of rejecting particular scripts as undesirable. In this respect, agency


involves the application of practical evaluation to available scripts in theprocess of constructing the life course, to use the language of Emirbayer andMische (1998). Second, broader dimensions of temporality, notably throughthe incorporation of historical context, are also apparent. As a small butimportant body of work has focused on the variability of agency in differenthistorical contexts (see for example, Elder, 1999; Shanahan, Elder, & Miech,1998), there is the implicit idea in Aronson’s interviews that cohort differ-ence between her interviewees and the choice set of potential role modelsmake the latter problematic. For women coming of age in the wake of‘‘women’s liberation’’ and concomitant greater opportunities for educationand paid employment, the models provided by older generations are lessresonant and less appealing. This is particularly the case when one considersthe more jagged and complicated life choices that confront such women asthey move out of their adolescent years. Such work is important in showingthe complex interplay of gender, biography, and historical context thatframes much life course scholarship.

One additional contribution of Aronson’s research is that it explicitlyconsiders social differentiation in the construction of adulthood. In focusingon the ways in which women have or have not role models in their lives andhow they make use of them, she adds to an important body of work on thegender stratification of the life course. This theme of differentiation isforcefully picked up in Brown and Lichter’s analysis of the long-term con-sequences of child disadvantage for volunteering in early adulthood.

One of the interesting aspects of life course studies of agency, if not lifecourse studies more generally, is that they have tended to focus on role-related activities and near network experiences. As such, studies of school,work, and family predominate. Brown and Lichter extend the domain ofsuch inquiry by examining volunteering in adulthood as an aspect of de-velopment over the life span. Their work is also important in developing asocial psychological theory that links early disadvantage to later volunteer-ing, a process they view as ‘‘pro-social’’ development. Their perspectiveemphasizes the possibilities of estrangement, resilient altruism, and generaldevelopment as key elements of agency in the transition to adulthood. Usingdata from a large national probability sample, the well-known NationalLongitudinal Survey of Youth-1979, they show that the long-term effects ofchildhood disadvantage on volunteering are mediated by adolescent devel-opment. In broader terms, their research shows the limits of deterministicconceptions of social origins and the ways in which the unfolding life course,in both social and psychological terms, provides new opportunities forbehavior and investment. In the end, the disadvantaged children studied by

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Brown and Lichter have much variability in their altruistic activities andhave the ability to move beyond their origins and the detrimental circum-stances that have the potential to undermine pro-social activities deep intothe life course.

Implicit in both existing theoretical work and the contributions to thisvolume is the idea that agency exists and matters in the formation of the lifecourse. While Shanahan and Porfeli do not negate the basic principles atwork, their chapter explores a remarkably understudied yet important phe-nomenon. Almost all of social science research focuses on that which isstructured and (at least reasonably) routine. Similarly, most life coursescholarship seeks to identify structured patterns of behavior and experienceover the life span. Even in studies that explicitly incorporate agency, there isan explicit idea that particular types of orientations are structurally linked toparticular types of outcomes (see for example, Hitlin & Elder’s, this vol-ume). In contrast to this, Shanahan and Porfeli focus on the role that chanceplays in the life course. By definition, chance events are those that areunlikely or nonroutine and typically fall beyond the control of actors. Im-portantly, chance events, at least hypothetically, hold the same status asagents of change (i.e., causes) as other life course events. In order to un-derstand the place of chance events in the life course, Shanahan and Porfelimake use of in-depth interviews to outline different ways in which peoplearticulate chance experiences and their consequences.

Although their research produces some fascinating and diverse examplesof chance events, such events pose particular problems for researchers. No-tions of chance is not routinely or even easily employed by actors in makingsense of their lives and such events are difficult to measure. At the sametime, even if we could identify a class of experiences that are chance events,identifying their role in the shaping of the life course is decidedly compli-cated. Still, this last concern yields a particularly interesting insight thatlinks together chance and agency. While some events themselves are chanceoccurrences, at least in a personal sense, the ways in which such events areexperienced, interpreted, and shaped is far from random. This ultimatelyleads the authors to conclude that a useful and important avenue of inquiryis the study of subjective assessments of chance and how actors make senseof their role in the construction of the life course. In this respect, Shanahanand Porfeli provide an important link between notions of chance and no-tions of agency and suggest fresh lines of inquiry into agentic processes thatgovern the life course.

It should be clear that the various chapters discussed all make unique andimportant contributions to our understanding of agency in the life course.


As the general focus of all pieces is the role of agency in shaping the tran-sition to adulthood, such work is an important addition given the increasedconcern, discussion, and debate over the character of such transitions in thelate 20th and early 21st century (see for example, Settersten, Furstenberg, &Rumbaut, 2005). At the same time, there is interesting evidence that thesocial world surrounding the transition to adulthood is both increasinglyinstitutionalized and increasingly de-institutionalized (Bruckner & Mayer,2005; Shanahan, 2000). Hence, it may be increasingly important to under-stand processes of selection and design, decision-making and investment, asfundamental shapers of the transition to adulthood. As a group, the chap-ters help illuminate theoretically, methodologically, and empirically key is-sues of agency in the life course. In the following section, we shift attentionto the companion element of the subjective dimensions of the life course,specifically subjectivity and identity and its role in the construction ofadulthood.

FROM AGENCY TO SUBJECTIVITY: EXPANDING

THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LIFE COURSE

At the core of human agency is the notion of the self. Extending back to theclassic work of George Herbert Mead (1934), generations of scholars haveunderstood action as situated in relation to the content of the self, thestructure of the self, and the dynamics of self (McCall & Simmons, 1978).For Mead, the nature of the self is almost entirely a social product in that itarises, is formed, and is exercised through social interaction. In formulatingthe basic principles of what has come to be known as symbolic interactions,Mead argued that infants and young children develop as social beings byimitating the actions of others. Through ‘‘play,’’ children come to act outvarious types of actions that are associated with social roles that are char-acteristic of later life and that they see through the observation of adults.Yet, children’s play eventually evolves into more complicated ‘‘games’’ inwhich children act out a role in its fuller form. While Mead called this‘‘taking the role of the other,’’ it might more accurately be described astaking the ‘‘roles’’ of the other as it involves a more multi-faceted anddynamic exercise of behavior. Moreover, it is only through this latter, morecomplex process that individuals develop a sense of self, a sense of them-selves as separate agents. In this regard, the self is usefully partitioned intothe ‘‘I’’ and the ‘‘me.’’ Here, the ‘‘I’’ is the large unsocial individual,

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a relatively uncomplicated package of needs, wants, and desires. In contrast,the ‘‘me’’ is the social self, characterized by one’s ability to see oneself asothers see you.

Building upon this framework, Stryker (1968, 1980) offers identity theory.At its core, identity theory suggests that commitment to particular rolesimpacts identity salience which then impacts role performance. Two thingsare fundamental in this framework. The first is that the psychological proc-esses that link commitment to a role (commitment) to the importance of therole for one’s identity (identity salience) to the exercise of activities conso-nant with that role (role performance) is critically affected by the largersocial structure. In this respect and consonate with Elder’s (1994, 1999)dictum that agency is always expressed within given sociohistorical contexts,identity is strongly shaped by one’s position within networks of stratificationand integration. For Stryker (1979, p. 90), identity theory

ybeginning with the symbolic interactionist dictum that self is an emergent from society

and organizes social behavior, conceptualizes the self as a structure of identities organ-

ized in a hierarchy of salience. It defines identities as internalized sets of role expec-

tations, with the person having as many identities as roles played in distinct sets of social

relationships.

Here, identities are multiple but variable as the distribution of identitieswithin a hierarchy of salience will directly reflect the varying degrees ofcommitment that one has toward different roles. Such role commitments areintrinsically tied to the larger structure of society and one’s embeddedness innetworks of social relations that either facilitate or impede access to a givenrole. Such commitments are shaped by the recognition of certain ‘‘role ex-pectations’’ that others have of how one should act and what one should dowhen enacting a particular role. To come full circle, the choices one makesto act or not act both within and across roles, assuming equal probability ofoccurrence, reflects the different location of a given identity within a givenidentity salience hierarchy. As such, agency is intrinsically tied to identity ormore accurately identities.

A second fundamental feature emerges from the work of Burke and col-leagues (Burke, 1991; Burke & Gray, 1999; Burke & Reitze, 1981; Tsushima& Burke, 1999). Beginning with the key question of how expectations areinternalized by individuals and acted out, emphasis turns to the symbolicnature of social roles and the ways in which these tie together identity andaction. A starting point here is the idea that all social behavior is symbolicbehavior, which is behavior cued by the things that they symbolize. The self,by extension, is also symbolic and hence exists within some semantic space.


The key argument that ties agency to identity is that both behaviors andidentities occupy semantic space and as a result people will select behaviorswhose meaning is most closely related to a salient identity. In other words,identities will tend to produce behaviors that express those identities.

Although symbolic interactionism and identity theory provide an impor-tant backdrop to understanding the subjective dimensions of the life course,there is a certain irony to the fact that prior work has identified all the majorcomponents, but has not put them together in such a way as to understandthe ‘‘inner side’’ of the life course (Shanahan, 2000; Andrew et al., thisvolume). There appear two key gaps. First, self and identity are based onroles that are implicitly age-graded, yet the dynamics associated with ageand aging, particularly in a social way, have received little attention. In theearly articulations of identity theory, emphasis was placed on social rolesand the variable connections that one has to such roles. Here, the roles ofworker, spouse, parent, and student have all figured prominently. Yet, in alife course context, these roles do not merely exist but instead appear toindividuals in the form of a socially prescribed script that indicates, not justwhat expectations come with a given role, but also when entry into a rolecan or should occur. People can be ‘‘on-time’’ or ‘‘off-time’’ and can be‘‘early,’’ ‘‘suitable,’’ or ‘‘late in terms of their role acquisitions (Neugarten,Moore, & Lowe, 1965). Equally important, such scripts are cultural prod-ucts and hence change with changing social and institutional conditions anddiffer across social strata. For example, the combination of lengtheningeducational careers and increasing wage-penalties for low education havemade it increasingly common for people to be in school in their late 20s andearly 30s (see Pallas, this volume). Similarly, the phenomenon of teenagechildbearing appears to be considerably more normative among African-American females than it is among other racial groups (Mollborn, 2005).The key point is that the social expectations surrounding social roles andtheir connection to identity are dynamic in and of themselves. As a result, itis important to consider how the timing of roles and role expectations bothfor an individual and within a given social context impacts upon identity,the salience of a role, and the execution of role-related behaviors.

A second gap is the lack of attention to the fact that roles themselvesaggregate to define particular life stages and serve in an almost taken forgranted manner as the master statuses of one’s identity. Childhood is de-fined not simply by age but by a particular confluence of social roles that arethemselves sociohistorical in nature. In modern Western societies, childhoodis associated with a certain degree of role constraint that is largely organizedaround the idea of dependence. On the one hand, almost all such nations

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have cultural and legal prescriptions that define minimum age at marriageand limits on sexual activity (e.g., statutory rape laws). At the same time,there exist laws that explicitly describe the expectations of dependencethrough minimal standards of care and levy sanctions (including loss ofchildren, imprisonment, etc.) when such standards are violated. The sociallives of children are further constrained by laws and expectations that chil-dren, up to a certain age, will be full-time students and will not participate inthe labor force. Further along the life span, notions of adulthood are so-cially and psychologically defined by role exits and role entries (Hogan &Astone, 1986). Adulthood is defined both personally and socially in terms ofmovement out of school, and into full-time employment, marriage, parent-hood, and independent living. Although the specific criteria in use is variableboth across time and across social groups (Settersten et al., 2005), socialroles serve as key ‘‘markers’’ of adulthood and ultimately converge to defineone’s status in the life course. A focus on specific roles and role-relatedidentity has typically downplayed such issues with the consequence thatidentity theory has also downplayed the social and psychological signifi-cance of life stages.

As a consequence, it is only recently that sustained interest in theoreticaland empirical issues of the age grading of identity has emerged. Tradition-ally, life course social psychology has focused much more on (perceived)expressions of agency rather than issues of identity as age-graded, life spanphenomena. As Shanahan (2000) notes, efforts to understand the transitionto adulthood have been overly demographic in orientation and executionwith the consequence that a ‘‘developmental’’ life course perspective is reallynonexistent. Although hundreds of researchers have considered aspirations,expectations, efficacy, esteem, and planfulness, much less work has soughtto understand the cultural expression of identity–role nexuses or their in-ternalization (Shanahan, Porfeli, Mortimer, & Erickson, 2005).

Pallas in his contribution to this volume adds to our understanding of thelatter in a particularly provocative way. He begins with the seemingly benignissue of exits from formal schooling and its status as a marker of the tran-sition to adulthood. Considerable theoretical work, including that within thehighly influential Wisconsin tradition (see for example, Sewell & Hauser,1975), uses exits from schooling as a key transition between adolescence andadulthood as social scientists typically view transitions out of school asindicative of a move from a (largely) involuntary institutional context andsocial role, one characterized by constrained agency and limited choice, tothe much more open arenas of work and family and the increased flexibilityfor varied action. In contrast, Pallas offers a two-pronged critique. First, the


fixed or regimented institutions of ‘‘high school’’ and ‘‘college’’ and thepathway between them is no longer (if it ever was) the norm. Instead, in-dividuals in recent decades have educational careers that potentially traversemultiple institutions and extend for variable periods of time. Second, andlogically consistent with the former point, respondents interviewed by Pallasdo not see school exits are particularly important in the transition to adult-hood. Instead, they focus on psychological achievements, notably being‘‘responsible,’’ as much more salient indicator of adulthood. Pallas furtherties this to the emergence of a post-modern world and the increased expo-sure to many more role enactments. As conceptions of roles multiply, itbecomes more and more difficult to discern what constitutes the ‘‘real’’enactment of a role or what constitute clear role expectations. In this con-text, the normative aspects of roles (i.e., good versus bad students, workers,spouses, parents), including role motives, become more important points ofreference. In the end, Pallas ends with a challenge to sociologists to changetheir frame of reference from a focus on roles entries and exits in the un-derstanding of the life course to a focus on role enactment, how roles areperformed and how these tie into cultural conventions on what a role shouldlook like. Such a view will not only expand the domain of inquiry butprovide an additional lens into the meanings of adulthood, particular themeanings that actors themselves use as frames of reference.

If Pallas’s work directs us to a more direct confrontation with the psy-chological underpinnings of the transition to adulthood, the contribution ofHartmann and Toguchi Swartz provides an initial map of what the variousdimensions of this may look like. They start with the oft-repeated view thatthe transition to adulthood is an increasingly complicated and extendedventure and draw upon in-depth interviews with respondents in the late 20sand early 30s. As part of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitionsto Adulthood and Public Policy, their interviews focused on developing abetter understanding of their respondent’s subjective conceptions of adult-hood, how they understand conventional markers, and how they envisionprocesses of aging and the meaning of ‘‘success’’ in the life course. One ofthe more interesting aspects of their work is their articulation of adulthoodas a package of social roles and personal qualities. Rather than see adult-hood as a function of a given role or role transition, Hartmann and Swartzthrough their interviewees develop a multi-dimensional view of adulthoodthat integrates social and psychological factors and emphasizes the dynam-ics of roles, role transitions, agency, and subjectivity in the unfolding lifespan. Such a dynamic view is important in that it provides a basis forunderstanding why the life course is experienced simultaneously as positive

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and laden with opportunity and trepidatious and filled with uncertainty andadversity. Echoing Pallas, Hartmann and Swartz conclude by situatingsubjective perceptions of adulthood in the context of an emerging post-industrial economy characterized by new technologies and ephemeral labormarket opportunities, as well as general cultural shifts toward more ex-pressive, individualistic, and therapeutic ideals as governing motives forboth self and society.

One further issue that is crystallized in the research of Hartmann andSwartz is the idea that the social and psychological distinctions betweenadolescence and adulthood are much fuzzier than previously conceived. Con-sistent with this view, Johnson and colleagues’ research on relative age is bothsignificant and important. Relative age refers to the issue of whether people ofany age see themselves as younger, neither older nor younger, or older thanothers of the same age. Intrinsically, this question taps into the differentiationbetween objective age, social age, and psychological age. Importantly, ‘‘adult’’roles are consistently associated with perceptions as older than similarly agedpeers. These include not living with family, full-time work, marriage, andparenthood. Although some of these effects vary by chronological age and arecontingent upon the presence (or absence) of other roles, role transitions areclear influences of subjective perceptions of age.

The ideas that adulthood is understood as a package of social and psy-chological attributes and role contingencies in the effects of given roles areechoed in the focus groups studied by Andrew and colleagues. Beginningwith the question of how important are demographic transitions to actor’sunderstandings of adulthood (an issue that we pursue further below in ourconsideration of the idea of ‘‘emerging adulthood’’), the authors directlyconfront the question of how social roles signify adulthood. Rejecting whatthey call the ‘‘artificial division’’ between social and psychological markersof adulthood, they use data from focus groups to flesh out the inter-connected and multi-dimensional ways in which individuals construct ideasof adulthood. Two innovations emerge. First, they show the loose couplingbetween internal and external images of adulthood. In the former case,actors appear to reflect on their past and present in an effort to understandwhat headway they have made toward adult status. The key point is thatbiography provides reference points that contribute to a larger ‘‘schema’’ (ormodel) of what adulthood means. External images of adulthood are also akey component of schema of adulthood. Here, others, both generalized andspecific (to make use of Mead’s distinction), provide images of how roles areor are not connected to the broader schema. Consistent with Pallas’s em-phasis on role enactments rather than role transitions (or occupancy),


Andrew and colleagues show that being in an ‘‘adult’’ role does notautomatically confer ‘‘adult’’ status.

The second innovation in their work is their effort to explain why de-mographic markers matter. Building off of the idea that roles in and ofthemselves do not convey adult status, their focus group analyses reveal themechanisms by which social roles are used by individuals to signify adult-hood. Adult roles in the most general form are socially distinct from thosethat dominate adolescence with the consequence that they have the potentialto produce a new sense of self. According to their respondents, adult rolesprovide opportunities to act as an ethical and responsible individual who isself-reliant and capable of giving care and support to others. In this respect,adult roles invert the dependency characteristic of childhood and to someextent adolescence. They provide space and relationships by which peoplecan act autonomously and potently, revealing the intrinsic ties between self-identity and agency over the life span. At the same time, the self-reliant andresponsible actor also lacks the ‘‘safety net’’ that parents (and schools) typ-ically provide for children. As a consequence, adulthood is not viewed as aperiod of generically greater freedom and instead is a stage that combinesfreedom and constraint, opportunity and obligation. To unify their work,Andrew and colleagues tentatively suggest the utility of identity theory as aframe for understanding the dynamic interplay of the social and psycho-logical factors in constructing adulthood.

Benson and Furstenberg’s contribution complements that of Andrew andcolleagues in that they use survey data from the Philadelphia EducationalLongitudinal Study (PELS) to examine how role transitions shape subjectiveperceptions of adulthood. Their use of the PELS data is important in that itis a sample of predominantly racial minorities from working poor andworking class families and is thus quite distinct from both National prob-ability samples and the largely white, and largely middle class respondentsthat dominate prior work. Benson and Furstenberg make four key contri-butions. First, they explicitly model change in self-identity to show howadult identity emerges in the complicated years following high school. Sec-ond, they buttress the arguments of Andrew and colleagues, Pallas, andHartmann and Swartz by showing that transitions into ‘‘adult’’ type socialroles do not intrinsically relate to self-perceptions of adulthood. Instead,some transitions more than others shape adult identity. In comparing theeffects of different role transitions, only movement into parenthood is un-equivocally associated with (changing) perceptions of adulthood.

Benson and Furstenberg are also among the first to explicitly consider theimpact of role reversals on perceptions of adulthood. They find that role

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reversals, in general, are associated with decreased likelihood of perceivingoneself as an adult. In other words, subsequent movement out of adult socialroles may be of equal importance as the more common issue of movementinto social roles. Finally, Benson and Furstenberg, echoing the arguments ofHartmann and Swartz, explicitly consider contingencies in the relationshipbetween social roles and perceptions of adulthood. Consistent with the ex-pectation that adulthood emerges in the context of a package of social andpsychological characteristics, roles of independent living and full-time em-ployment are contingent upon one another. Alone, neither matters for per-ceptions of adult identity, yet together they significantly increase thelikelihood of seeing oneself as an adult. Overall, this work provides a multi-faceted assessment of the social origins of self-perceived adulthood, does sowith unique and interesting data, and provides nuance to our understandingof the influence of role transitions and ‘‘adult’’ social roles more generallyon self-identification as an adult.

Emerging Adulthood and Subjectivity in the Transition to Adulthood

Although the issue of life course context and age-grading of identity hastraditionally been a bit of a ‘‘black box,’’ there is an emerging body of work,some of it captured in this volume, that is beginning to fill in this gap. Indoing so, this work examines issues of identity through the late teens andearly 20s, the key dimensions, both social and psychological, of ‘‘adult-hood,’’ and the factors, again both psychological and social, that shapeidentification as an adult. Yet, recent efforts to articulate a theory of self andidentity in the transition to adulthood have proved important and provoc-ative, yet at the same time controversial. Most significant is the work ofpsychologist Jeffrey Arnett and his ideas of ‘‘emerging adulthood.’’

The idea of emerging adulthood is grounded in both an assessment ofdemographic change and a theory of social development. For the former,Arnett (2000); Arnett and Tauber (1994) argue that sweeping demographicchanges through the latter half century have made the late teens and early20s a period where individuals do not transition into adult roles but insteadengage in broad and multi-faceted practices of exploration. The key aspectsof change involve the extension of educational careers through the mid 20s,which is combined with more tentative and less permanent movement intocareer-like work, and increased delays in marriage and parenthood (see forexample, Fussell & Furstenberg, 2005). Such changes, according to Arnett,have altered the nature of social development in the late teens and early 20s.


Specifically, the diminished or slowed transition into adult roles means thatrole acquisition and concomitant identity (as discussed earlier in reference toMead, Stryker, and Burke) is recast in concert with the more exploratoryand more ephemeral role acquisition. Arnett (2000) concludes that this hasultimately produced a new phase of life, emerging adulthood, that is neitheradolescence nor adulthood, and is distinguished by a relative independencefrom both social roles and normative expectations. As he states,

‘‘Having left the dependency of childhood and adolescence, and having not yet entered

the enduring responsibilities that are normative in adulthood, emerging adults often

explore a variety of possible life directions in love, work, and world views. Emerging

adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible, when little

about the future has been decided for certain, when the scope of independent exploration

of life’s possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the

life course (Arnett, 2000, p. 469).’’

In marshalling evidence in support of the thesis that emerging adulthood is adistinct phase of life, different from adolescence and different from adult-hood, Arnett emphasizes three inter-connected phenomena.

The first, already discussed, is the demographic nature of emerging adult-hood. Put simply, there have been significant shifts in the timing of markersof adulthood with the consequences that the age at which people adopt themultiplex of ‘‘adult’’ social roles (i.e., permanent exits from school, entryinto full-time, career-like work, marriage, parenthood, having left the familyhome) has moved further back in the life course (Fussell & Furstenberg,2005).2 The second is evidence from a number of studies of the relativesubjective importance of different criteria of adulthood. In Arnett’s (2001)own research, individuals in their 20s are asked whether they ‘‘have reachedadulthood’’ and the majority, just over 50%, respond both ‘‘yes and no,’’rather than either ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ (Arnett, 2001). Arnett interprets this asevidence of the subjective sense on the part of emerging adults that theyhave left adolescence but have not fully entered into adulthood. While it istempting to view this as a simple reflect of the demographic flux that isapparent during this age span, Arnett argues against such a view. Demo-graphic transitions, according to the research, have little to do with emerg-ing adult’s conceptions of what it means to reach adulthood and consistentlyrank at the bottom when respondents were presented with a list of items andasked whether they ‘‘must be achieved before a person can be considered tobe an adult.’’ In contrast, ‘‘individualistic qualities of character’’ emerge asthe most important criteria. Specifically, accepting responsibility for one’sself, making decisions, and becoming financially independent were the mostimportant factors identified. Arnett interprets this as evidence that

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adulthood is understood by individuals in the context of becoming a self-sufficient person. Only after these character qualities emerge do emergingadults experience a subjective change in their developmental status.3

The third dimension of emerging adulthood involves the idea of identityexploration. As adulthood as a social form and personal experience is in-creasingly unanchored from distinct social roles and increasingly under-stood in terms of subjective criteria, it is not surprising that issues of identitywould also be in flux. Yet, rather than see this process as intrinsicallyproblematic, Arnett suggests that emerging adulthood provides social spacefor individuals to explore, test, and ultimately adopt different identities. Inthe realm of love, emerging adulthood provides a venue where one canconsider love in both an intimate and serious manner. In adolescence, datingis largely recreational, more transient, and less serious, at least in a lifecourse manner. Emerging adulthood also involves explorations in work. Inadolescence, work is often part-time, and if full-time, less career-based(Mortimer, 2003). In contrast, emerging adults can try on different workroles, learning what they like and equally important what they don’t like.While adolescent work, at least tangibly, has little to do with later careers,work in emerging adulthood is focused on preparation for adult work roles.Emerging adults take work ‘‘more seriously’’ and begin to consider howtheir work experiences will connect to those in later life. Finally, world viewsin emerging adulthood are a central facet of identity. Although much of theavailable evidence comes from college students, the post-high school yearsare characterized by exposure, both within and outside of school environ-ments, to a more varied set of ideas and viewpoints. Thus, it is not surprisingthat this period would be characterized by considerable reflection and in-trospection that might challenge long-held views that originated in one’sfamily or early schooling.

In sum, the idea of emerging adulthood is that sociohistorical change hasproduced a new period of the life course that straddles adolescence and adult-hood and produces a unique context for social psychological development.This idea is clearly provocative (even to the point of generating an ‘‘EmergingAdulthood Conference’’). It has generated a tremendous amount of interestand has begun to generate empirical assessments of the core theses (see forexample, Shanahan et al., 2005). It is further testament to the importance ofthe idea of emerging adulthood that several of the chapters in this volume,with no expressed preference from the editor, took on this issue explicitly.

As noted, central to the idea of ‘‘emerging adulthood’’ is the premise thatadulthood as a life stage is increasingly understood in psychological terms.While cohorts in the past may indeed have used demographic markers to


denote adult status (although we really do not know as no work was doneon the topic), the increasing disorder and role fragmentation of the last 20thand early 21st centuries has ‘‘psychologized’’ adulthood. While Arnett andcolleagues have marshaled evidence in favor of this position, various chap-ters contribute new data, new conceptualizations, and new methods to thequestion.

One of the concerns with prior work on ‘‘emerging adulthood’’ is that thesamples used were either convenience samples of college students or com-munity samples largely comprised of middle class respondents. In contrast,Benson and Furstenberg draw upon longitudinal data from inner-city,largely African-American working poor and working class adolescents. Im-portantly, such a sample is likely to have much less opportunity for varioustypes of role transitions, including movement into higher education, full-time, career-like employment, and marriage. As a result, the disorderlytransitions that sit at the heart of Arnett’s thesis are likely less applicable.Equally important, the research directly measures role transitions, both intoand out of ‘‘adult’’ type social roles and subjective perceptions of individ-ualistic responsibilities, notably financial responsibilities (i.e., paying rentand financially supporting one’s self and family) and household responsi-bilities (i.e., cleaning, cooking, taking care of relatives).

Benson and Furstenberg’s results challenge the idea that subjective cri-teria are paramount in conceptions of adulthood. First, they show that bothrole transitions and individualistic responsibility matter. Transitions intoindependent living and parenthood, particularly for females, and the com-bination of independent living and employment all foster perceptions ofadult status. Transition reversals also matter, decreasing the likelihood ofperceiving oneself as an adult. Other role transitions, including education,cohabitation, and parenthood are less consequential. When individual re-sponsibilities are simultaneously considered, they do little to diminish theimpact and themselves have varied effects. Of household and financial re-sponsibilities, only the latter influence perceptions of adulthood. This sug-gests that role transitions do play a unique role in perceptions of adult statusand undermines arguments that adulthood in the contemporary period isunderstood largely in psychological terms.

Although their focus is not specifically on perceptions of adulthood,Johnson and colleagues provide a detailed, multi-dimensional assessment ofthe subjective dimensions of aging. Making innovative use of a Nationalprobability sample, their research is unique in explicitly considering socio-structural position, concomitant role transitions, and measures of maturityand independence. The data themselves are an important contribution in

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that the sample studied is considerably broader and considerably more di-verse, in terms of race, class, and gender, than that considered in prior work.

Consistent with Benson and Furstenberg, role transitions clearly matterfor age identity. Not living with one’s family (of origin) significantly in-creases self-perceived age, as does full-time work, marriage or cohabitation,and parenthood. Equally important, the meaning of role transitions for ageidentity is often contingent, dependent upon chronological age, race andclass, and psychological assessments of maturity and independence. Atyounger ages, not being a student dramatically increases perceptions as‘‘older’’ but this effect ebbs with advancing age. Whether signifiers of‘‘adulthood’’ or not, role transitions clearly shape how old one ‘‘feels.’’

At the same time, psychological perceptions of financial independence,maturity, and independence also matter. Although financial independence,in contrast to much prior work (including other chapters in this volume),appears to matter little, both self-perceived maturity and self-perceived in-dependence have strong effects on perceived age. Those who see themselvesas more mature and those who see themselves as more independent, also seethemselves as ‘‘older’’ than their similarly aged peers. Yet importantly, thereare further contingencies here in that psychological perceptions often inter-act with race, social class, and role transitions in fostering age identity.

While Benson and Furstenberg and Johnson and colleagues offer differ-ent evidence on role transitions as fundamental factors in perceptions ofadulthood, Andrew and colleagues provide depth and understanding to how

such factors matter. Bringing innovative data to the debate, Andrew andcolleagues draw upon data from a series of focus groups conducted in aMidwestern city. A key finding is that their respondents did not dismiss roletransitions in their subjective perceptions of adulthood. Instead, they viewedsuch markers as conduits in the transition to adulthood. Exits from school-ing, movement into full-time employment, marriage, parenthood, and leav-ing the family home were seen as the necessary structure for achieving manyof the internal and individualistic changes associated with adulthood. In theend, they both support demographic conceptions of the transition to adult-hood and provide an integrative framework that locates the necessary socialcontext which allows for the type of personal development that Arnett andcolleagues view as central in the apprehension of adulthood.

Hartmann and Swartz’s in-depth interviews provide additional depth in un-derstanding how emerging or ‘‘young’’ adulthood is understood by youngAmericans. In asking their interviewees to articulate what this life stage lookslike and how it is experienced, they show that social roles and personal qualitiesare both central to conceptions of adulthood. Social roles are a critical


dynamics in the unfolding life span as they are a horizon of opportunity andrisk, the social landscape by which ‘‘young’’ adults envision the space betweenadolescence and adulthood. Importantly, this chapter is unique in articulatingthe double-edged sword of young or emerging adulthood. While Arnett’s(2000) work emphasizes themes of exploration and experimentation and pro-vides a generally optimistic assessment of what this stage provides in humandevelopment, Hartmann and Swartz’s respondents articulate both the good andthe bad. They appreciate the dynamism and opportunity that confronts them,yet at the same time see the lack of structure as infusing risk and difficulty intothe transition process. As a result, the chapter provides depth in assessment ofthe meaning of emerging adulthood, as well as broadens the terms of debate.

In sum, the various contributions on the ‘‘inner side’’ of the transition toadulthood provide a multi-faceted assessment of how people make sense oflife course states, how adulthood is constructed and re-constructed as actorstraverse different relationships and role, and how the social and psycho-logical factors interact to produce a far from taken-for-granted, if not con-tested and constantly evaluated, image of self and adulthood. They alsomake important contributions to the on-going debates over emerging adult-hood. If there is one key theme that all of the pieces echo, it is that thedistinction between objective and subjective, between social and psycho-logical dimensions is not particularly useful as it fails to consider the com-plex ways in which role transitions are enacted and interpreted in thedynamic processes that characterize the transition to adulthood.

CONCLUSION

There were two objectives for this introductory chapter. The first was to mapout classic and contemporary issues in the study of human agency in the lifecourse. Here, the fundamental issue is what agency is and how it operates in theconstruction of human lives. A key point of reference in this discussion is theidea that agency as psychological orientation is expressed within given socio-historical (Elder, 1994) and sociostructural (Stryker, 1980) contexts that giventhem form, meaning, and efficacy. Intriguingly, this relatively simple yet im-portant principle has considerable importance in understanding the ways inwhich contemporary adolescents are constructing, both socially and psycho-logically, adulthood. For some, the late modern period is a period of increasedflexibility, choice, and chance (Buchmann, 1989) and has potentially led to thecreation of a new, largely exploratory stage of life, notably ‘‘emerging adult-hood’’ (Arnett, 2000). Others have focused on structural transformations and

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their impact upon opportunity structures (see for example, Booth, Crouter, &Shanahan, 1999). A key theme here is that the transition to adulthood is anincreasingly difficult enterprise characterized by more limited labor marketopportunities, decreases in living wages, and poorer economic prospects. It is ofsome significance that many of the papers in this volume bring empirical ev-idence to bear on what agency is and how it is exercised in the transition toadulthood. Although they do not resolve the on-going (and perhaps unresolv-able) debates over structure and agency, they do provide us with a richerunderstanding of the different ways in which agency operates in the life course.Here, agency is the complex sum of psychological orientations of self-efficacyand optimism (Hitlin and Elder), the perception of role models, both good andbad and present and absent, and their use or rejection in the transition toadulthood (Aronson), the social structure that underlies chance events and theways in which chance events are molded into something purposive (Shanahanand Porfeli), long-term selection and choice that give rise to careers both withinand beyond work (Zimmer-Gimbeck and Mortimer), and flat out expressionsof altruism that reflect earlier experiences in the life span (Brown and Lichter).Each of these pieces makes important claims in their own right, but in the endshowcase the complexity of agency and its role in shaping the life course.

As agency is intrinsically tied to identity, a second set of papers considerthe ‘‘inner side’’ of the transition to adulthood, focusing explicitly on sub-jective perceptions of adulthood, what constitutes them and what formsthem. In works that span a wide array of methodologies, they combine togive both breadth and depth to an understudied issue. Whether unpackingthe inconsistency between social science and individual understandings ofwhat school exits mean in the transition to adulthood (Pallas), illuminatingthe complex relationships between demographic transitions and subjectiveperceptions of adulthood (Benson and Furstenberg, Andrew and colleagues,Hartmann and Swartz), exploring the multi-faceted contingencies in theconstruction of relative age (Johnson and colleagues), or challenging thesesabout the structure and process of identity formation in ‘‘emerging adult-hood’’ (all contributions), the various chapters go a long way to filling the‘‘black box’’ of subjective identity in the transition to adulthood.

In sum, the various pieces on agency and subjectivity make strong con-tributions to our understanding of the ways in which contemporary youngpeople ‘‘construct’’ adulthood. In the end, it is hoped that these pieces, aloneor in sum, provide a spring board for future work, both theoretical andempirical, on the psychology of the life course and the inter-relations ofagency, identity, and social structure in the increasingly complex transitionto adulthood.


NOTES

1. Volume 9 of Advances in Life Course Research entitled ‘‘The Structure of theLife Course: Standardized? Individualized? Differentiated?’’ includes several excel-lent chapters that tackle similar issues and debates as addressed in this volume butfrom a social demographic perspective.2. While evidence of demographic change is not in dispute, it is interesting to

consider what benchmark is used to determine both the ‘‘normative’’ life course andhow different the current pattern of transitions is. Current research typically focuseson the 1950s and 1960s and the baby boom cohorts. Yet, long-term historical worksuggests that it may be this particular period that may be aberrant and that the‘‘normative’’ life course as it has traditionally been conceived has ignored consid-erable variation by race, class, gender, and nativity. Fussell and Furstenberg (2005)touch upon this issue, while Ruggles (1994) provides a fascinating set of exampleswith respect to race, marriage, and parenthood.3. One exception to this is parenthood. Interestingly, parenthood, by itself, ranks

low as a necessary condition of adulthood. At the same time, those who had hadchildren viewed it as the most important marker of the transition to adulthood forthemselves (Arnett, 2000).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author acknowledges the support of the Life Course Center, theDepartment of Sociology, and the College of Liberal Arts at the Universityof Minnesota. I also had numerous helpful discussions on the social psy-chology of the life course with Doug Hartmann, Ann Meier, Phyllis Moen,Jeylan Mortimer, Evan Schofer, Michael Shanahan, Teresa Toguchi Swartz,and Mayumi Uno. I am also grateful to the numerous contributors for theirhigh quality and stimulating work that constantly required me to think andre-think agency, subjectivity, and the ‘‘inner side’’ of the life course.

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Documents

‘Constructing Adulthood’: Agency and Subjectivity in the Transition to Adulthood