Reviews

EXTRACTS FROM RECENT REVIEWS:


The Age newspaper, 24 November 2006
"Adult Themes - Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood"
By Rachel Hills

"If you're fed up with generational cockfights, relax: this is not a book about conservative boomers, directionless Xers and superficial Ys.

Inspired by a 2004 Quantum Market Research survey that branded Australians in their 20s and 30s as vapid and commitment-phobic "adultescents", Adult Themes looks beyond young and old to investigate what defines adulthood, how it's changing and what it means to be one in the 21st century.

Adult Themes turns the microscope to the norm, asking why buying a house is considered a sign of maturity but purchasing a digital music player is the ultimate in frivolity, why people who don't have children are depicted as selfish, and why delaying or foregoing marriage altogether is read as an unwillingness to commit to anything at all.

Crawford argues that our obsession with who and what is sufficiently "adult" reflects broader anxieties about work, housing, relationships and community.

Where once employment, marriage and adulthood itself were fixed, stable entities, this is no longer the case. Crawford writes: "Uncertainty and unreliability are becoming the rule and not the exception." But this uncertainty comes with its own opportunities. Rather than following the laid-out paths of marriage, children, mortgage and classical music, modern adults can redefine adulthood to fit their individual preferences and find new ways of engaging with family, property, work, culture and politics.

And they are doing just that: building committed relationships that have nought to do with blood or marriage; not buying into the property market, or buying into it in non-traditional ways; attending demonstrations, setting up blogs and creating political art rather than joining a political party.

You might ask why all this matters. If those of us who choose to can read Harry Potter, live with our parents and get political outside the party system, while others marry in our 20s, settle into an accountancy job and read literary fiction in our spare time (or any combination of the above) does it really make a difference if some of us are designated "adults" while others are deigned "kidults"?

Well, yes. Adulthood is more than just a label. "It's about who is included and who is excluded from the domain of adult citizens," Crawford writes. Who is considered fit to lead and make decisions. And those who deviate from the script suffer for it. Take John Hewson's famous slight on child-free former NSW premier Bob Carr: "You've got to be suspicious of a guy that doesn't drive and doesn't like kids." Or the media frenzy over the lack of fruit (and children) in Julia Gillard's kitchen.

This kind of criticism, Crawford argues, focuses on "the symbols of adulthood without the substance". It's not that some adults aren't more mature than others; it's that the answers aren't going to be found in something as simple as whether they own their own home. We need to ask deeper questions: "Are they engaging in their community? Are they making personal commitments to others? Are they responsible in their conduct?"

And part of that responsibility is making your own choices about how to live your life. Adult Themes' "new ethics of adulthood" is informed by Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity, and the book references a de Beauvoir quote likening those who "exercise their freedom only within this universe which has been set up before them" without testing the boundaries for themselves to be children. Crawford's adult, it seems, is one who asks questions and determines their own answers.

The book favours the old models of adulthood in just one arena: work. Crawford is understandably critical of the impacts of the "flexible" workplace and of media portrayal of young workers as the drivers of these changes, it's a sensitive subject. But in making this point, she neglects to recognise that for some (admittedly, privileged) workers, trading 7am SMSes and around-the-clock emails for the freedom to set their own hours and not wear a suit to work is an act of self-determination that reinvents work, in the same way forming kin-like relationships with your friends reinvents the family.

Still, this is minor criticism. In a genre that is often dominated by market research buzz words and glib generalisations, Adult Themes provides a refreshingly informed and nuanced alternative, going beyond X and Y to cut to the core of the ubiquitous generation wars and offer some hopeful alternatives for us all."

Until now. With the publication of Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood, Sydney University academic Kate Crawford has done anyone interested in the changes in cultural and social trends a great service. Crawford turns a practiced media critic’s eye on the ways in which generations have been framed in popular discourse, subjecting the claims made about Gen X and Gen Y to the test of, well, actual sociological evidence.

There is no doubt that intergenerational differences exist. However - and this is a point I’ve made in my previous writing on the subject - often generations are simply too broad a category to generalise about. Crawford captures this well. She writes ironically of the checklists that have appeared (even in such supposedly august publications as the Sydney Morning Herald) from which interested readers can discern whether they are in fact “kidults” or “adultescents”. Crawford asks: “Are the social attitudes of a 20-year-old Muslim girl in a Lebanese family of Sydney’s southwest the same as a white 17-year-old private schoolboy in Brisbane’s east? Both are nominally Generation Y, but do they share the same values? Which is typical of a generation? What about the unemployed 25-year-old daughter of a wheat farmer in West Wyalong?”

Crawford looks at a series of issues where rapid social change has been evident. Her overall thesis is that cultural and social shifts have been out in advance of the norms of how to do being an adult. The result? Factors which are actually influencing our whole society are blamed - wrongly - on the irresponsibility and immaturity of Gen X and Gen Y.

Her analysis is particularly sharp when it comes to the workplace. Building on a range of sources, including Andrew Ross’ excellent 2003 book No-Collar: the Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs, and press reports about the exploitation of young workers under the WorkChoices regime, Crawford argues the story has been told the wrong way round.

The transition from education to a full time job and a career has been central to the narrative of adulthood in our culture. Writing for the Sydney Morning Herald at the height of the dot.com boom, Crawford noticed the contradictory coverage of Gen X tech heads, as either daring innovators or self-interested, flighty slackers unable to commit to one job.

Not much has changed in the intervening few years, she suggests. Much of the popular business literature on “managing Gen Y” suggests organisations need to adapt tasks to the needs of young workers, who are supposedly able to constantly multi-task and will work only if they can see an instant payoff. When this is translated into actual management strategies, what we get, according to Crawford, is work intensification and a blurring of work and leisure supposedly in the name of “fun”.

The boot of flexibility, she argues, is firmly on management’s foot. The lack of commitment to one employer or job often attracts the ire of commentators, but is in fact a rational strategy responding to workplace restructuring.

What sense does it make to condemn Gen Y workers for not following a traditional career path when there are few on offer? And, Crawford also contends, picking up on her broader theme, these shifts in the nature of work are hardly peculiar to one generation.

Integrating her other theme, the masking of class difference by generational rhetoric, she highlights teenage and 20-something retail workers on the blunt edge of workplace flexibility. For every wired entrepreneurial knowledge worker written up in the business glossies, there are probably ten retail slaves having their penalty rates cut by a “fun” fast food chain.

Crawford has made two important contributions to public debate in Adult Themes. The first is to confront some of the sweeping generalisations of generation talk with evidence, and to reveal how angst about Gen Y and Gen X hides more than it reveals.

The second is to indicate that the social changes she points to are yet to be properly incorporated either into social norms or public debate generally. Her call for a debate over the “ethics of adulthood” may not be a barbecue stopper, but has the potential to take public conversation about our shared social situation down a track potentially far more interesting and productive than generation wars.

Adult Themes is both a lively and well-written book, which should help to reframe some of our most important public debates. "

Rather than defining adulthood by reference to an outmoded check list -- marriage, mortgage, children, a steady and linear career -- Crawford instead proposes asking what it means to be an ethical adult, thereby allowing a shift from "outward signs to shared values".

In her thoughtful, well-constructed first chapter, she charts the conventionally understood path from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, demonstrating that these concepts are not immutable but fluid and constructed. This allows her to use contextual curiosity and analytical insight to deflate mainstream assumptions about how we live, work, play, love, purchase, protest and engage in politics. She advocates inclusiveness, varied thinking and broader concepts of justice.

She is at her most cohesive while discussing the changing nature of work. Having noted the negative stereotypes of generations X and Y, she offers a fresh perspective:

"Uncertainty and unreliability -- characteristics that once defined "less adult" approaches to work -- are becoming the rule and not the exception. This shift is profound and troubling for those who experience it in their lives and workplaces. Its effects are wide-ranging ... Yet, strangely, media stories keep returning to young people -- be they called generation X or Y or anything else -- as the carriers of these changes into the workplace. But what much mainstream media coverage neglects to mention is that workplace changes are not caused by young workers. In fact, they are actors within the much bigger social and economic drama of work."

Crawford recognises that workers who seek to adjust to this new reality do so out of necessity as well as choice. This allows her to reflect anew on the changing nature of workplace flexibility, the uncertain future and purpose of unionism, the precarious predicament of lower-paid service industry workers and the positive but exploitative potential of the blurring of the line between work and play. Overall, she reformulates a debate she finds unsatisfactory rather than merely taking a stance within the existing paradigm."

The Sydney Morning Herald, 21st October 2006
"The bagging of X and Y earns a grade of Z"
By Jaqueline Maley

"Kate Crawford addresses the moral panic generated by the younger generations no longer holding down jobs for life, living at home for longer, marrying later, if at all, delaying parenthood and, often, eschewing home-ownership for tenancy. And then she sets out to "generously re-imagine" our definitions of adulthood.

This Crawford does with gusto and intelligence, showing how the so-called "adultescent" - the grown-up who refuses to take on the socially accepted mantle of adulthood - has become a dumping ground for society's worries about itself.

Society is becoming more materialistic, it is said, so it must be because young people value iPods and Nike trainers above "better" forms of ownership, such as cars and houses. Divorce rates are climbing as marriage rates drop: it must be because the Xers are too selfish to stick at a relationship.

Crawford, however, draws out the social and economic trends that are changing the way we live as adults. She makes a strong argument to show that "young people today" are often defined in the popular imagination by the products they consume. In the chapter on culture she quotes various journalists and commentators who opine that iPods may look like innocent little MP3 players, all candy-coloured and cute, but they are actually evil. At best, they will lead to "social isolation" among teenagers and, at worst, they will be used by pedophiles as tools to show children indecent images.

Compare these articles with others Crawford quotes from the 19th century, denouncing the sinfulness of theatre and popular music, and you begin to see her point - that all these arguments are really battles over who has the authority to dictate what's good culture and what isn't.

What we buy and whether or not we choose to put a foot on the property ladder do not dictate our values, no matter what our age or generation, yet the debate around these things is heavily value-laden. As Crawford says, in the eyes of the media, "kidults reduce society to a collection of selfish interests and trivialities". Thus, by denigrating so-called "kidults", new notions of adulthood and new interpretations of the "adult" values of maturity and responsibility are easily dismissed.

Crawford mounts a powerful argument that adult values are not being eroded, simply re-interpreted - which is the right of every new generation."

Adult Themes: advance praise