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580 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2002)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0580 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Interest in the cultural, social, and economic forces that shape the life course and establish critical life transitions can be traced back to the seminal ideas of Karl Mannheim (1923). Building on Mannheim's work, in the middle part of the past century, Matilda Riley and her colleagues under the aegis of the Social Science Research Council published a monumental review of the- ory and research on aging. This volume drew on research concepts and tools from demography, cultural studies, developmental psychology, sociology, and history. It explored the meaning of age for individuals and social systems and laid out an agenda of research on the cultural meaning of age, the social orga- nization of age groupings, and the biological change that accompanies aging, helping to found the field of social gerontology. It established age as a funda- mental pillar for analyzing individual and social change in the behavioral sci- ences. The most recent effort to expand the interdisciplinary work was spear- headed by Reed Larson who has organized an interdisciplinary team of researchers to review comparative research on adolescent development (Larson 2002). Over the past half century, notable progress has occurred in refining the- ory about age-related phenomena as well as developing the tools to examine aging as an individual process and how social systems respond to the aging of populations (Buchmann 1989; Coleman 1961; Elder 1974; Ryder 1965). The meaning of age has been unpacked by cultural historians and contemporary ethnographers; biological and psychological advances have illuminated the physical and interpersonal components of development from fetal age to old age; and demographers and sociologists have made strides in understanding the ramifications of both period and cohort effects. Despite the immense achievements in the second half of the twentieth cen- tury, we are still a long way from realizing the vision of C. Wright Mills who, drawing on Mannheim's work, argued that understanding social change required investigating the minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society (Mills 1959, ch. 9; see also Mills 2000). Nowhere is the gap between the vision and the reality more evident than in comparative and historical research on the organization of the life course-the subject of this issue. Our theories purporting to explain the organization of the life course have not been up to the task of reconciling cross-national differences, and our methodological tools for investigating differences within and across societies are still crude. This set of articles on the similarities and differences in the transition to adulthood in nations with advanced economies poses a series of fascinating puzzles that when solved will illuminate both our under- standing of historical change and personal development in early adulthood. The two final articles in this issue advance our understanding of the wide dif- ferences that are displayed in the preceding articles. 6

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