Emerging Adulthood and Reinventing Community: Productive Instability in Contemporary Institutions

• In Event: 545 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session.
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Identity and the Life Course

Abstract

Debate over the decline of American community and civic participation has preoccupied scholars of American society. In a distinct but related literature, researchers have documented the phenomenon of “emerging adulthood,” a lengthened post-college period, in which young adults search for a job, an identity, and a spouse, often without much communal structure. This paper links these two literatures by asking: what happens to established social and other institutions as they encounter the individualistic ethos that characterizes the “emerging adults” of today? Do institutions simply decay, or can they adapt, and if so, how? Through an ethnographic case study of a congregation transformed by a new and young, individualistically-oriented population, I show how the individualizing impulses of young adults in transition can produce not institutional disintegration, but a productive instability that actually allows institutions to build change into their organizational structure. This concept extends theories of organizational change by demonstrating not only how organizational change occurs, but how mechanisms for disruptive change can be built into the basic structure of even established organizations.

Author

• Matty Lichtenstein, University of California - Berkley