Failure in Emerging Adulthood: Narrative Agency in Career, Practice, and Care Institutions among Poor and Working Class Women

Abstract

Emerging adulthood is a period of high ambition and a high likelihood of failure. The process of managing failure in the transition to adulthood requires narrative work. Normative expectations for ambition make failure a cultural problem for emerging adults to solve. For poor and workingclass emerging adults, popular narratives of failure often pathologize them as youth-gone-bad or youth-gone-sad and undermine their ability to produce narratives of ambition. Nevertheless, they will respond to the pressure to tell an ambitious story. Drawing on four waves of life history interviews over a three-and-a-half year period with 23 poor and working-class emerging adult women, I show how they tell life stories using available institutional resources to narratively manage failure by responding to popular explanations for their failure and attempting to maintain claims to ambition. I distinguish between career, practice, and care institutions, which shape the possibilities for overcoming failure through narrative agency. This narrative institutionalism contributes to a better understanding of emerging adulthood and the cultural demands that poor and working-class youth must contend with over time. 2One period of life that is increasingly characterized by both ambition and failure is emerging adulthood (Waters et al. 2011). Scholars have identified several widely available explanations for failure among today's middle class 18-to 34-year-olds. They include lengthy periods of selfexploration (Smith 2009), economically-motivated returns to their parents' home (Newman 2012), and extended exposure to a higher education system that leaves graduates temporarily adrift and unprepared for independence (Arum and Roksa 2014; Clydesdale 2015). These "standard stories" (Tilly 1999) provide middle-class emerging adults with a normative framework to make sense of failure without minimizing their ambitious status; it is "helicopter parents" who have failed to let their children grow up, or the economic downturn that has cost the labor sector jobs, or a higher education system that has run amok-not the young adults boomeranging and drifting-who are to blame (Newman 2012). By contrast, poor and workingclass men and women who struggle to successfully enter adulthood encounter pathologizing narratives to explain their failure (Newman 1999b).As scholars have begun to examine more closely how today's 18-to 34-year-olds experience emerging adulthood, they have shown that coming-of-age experiences, and how young people interpret them often vary according to race, class, and gender. Whereas middle class millennials have access to standard stories of delayed ambition, poor and working-class young adults often adopt, respond to, and manage narratives of deviance, disability, and disorder when they account for their own and their peers' failure to achieve normative adulthood. These include stories of personal irresponsibility, criminal behavior, mental illness, and emotional trauma