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“we all need a vision of the human potential,” marjorie fiske writes in her philosophical contribution to the first-rate collection of essays “themes of love and work in adulthood.” selected to reflect “the relativity of adult development” and its sensitivity to cultural, social and sexual influences, the 12 scholarly papers presented here will likely have broad appeal.
Taken together, they offer a glimpse of the toddlerhood of an academic discipline as it explores every available theory and methodology. readers may feel dizzy as vistas of future research and theoretical synthesis come into view, some fleetingly, others in depth. for if there is by now a discipline of inquiry called “child development” with its established methodology, and some consensus as to what processes normal child development implies, no such unanimity pervades the study of adults. this may be a case of investigators trying “to keep all options open,” as fiske suggests, as they survey an age span of indeterminate length, diverse individual histories, and multitudinous cultural influences in a period of social change.
In his introduction, smelser tries to extract some generalizations from this confusion. after a series of tenuous comparisons and thematic interpretations, he concludes that the area needs “a careful formulation of the questions to be asked, the analytical levels to be opened, and the time spans to be considered in the inquiry” (p. 22). when this is accomplished, those variables that underlie normative patterns of adulthood and those that make for disruption or change can be delineated. smelser's argument is well taken. for example, the contributors share a perception of patterns in adulthood, but they differ as to whether they take the shape of life contours (smelser), stages (erikson and levinson), or hierarchies of commitment (fiske). although most seem convinced that adulthood is not a “secure if difficult accomplishment, a once-and-for-all achievement” (swindler, p. 143), a de