Societal Change and Role Transitions into Adulthood

Abstract

Of all the primordial bases of social organization, namely age, sex, race (including ethnicity), the least well understood is age. Social scientists have little response to the question: When does age become an important basis of social organization? In which socio-historical circumstances are societal institutions likely to use age as a central criterion in allocating persons to positions and roles and in scheduling access to scarce and valuable resources? In what circumstances do folkways and mores encourage individuals to view themselves and others as following relatively well delineated stages in a life course or as living out their lives according to a normative timetable? All these questions rephrase the same issue—that of the relativity of how time and lives are organized by aspects of collective life. They suggest that at some moments and in some settings, the age-grading and age-stratification of life events and roles are substantially more apparent than in other times and places.