The chapters of this book provide a wealth of information about major economic, demographic, political, and cultural conditions that could have an impact on adolescence in the century we have just entered. Eschewing catchy “futurism” with lists of predictions about tomorrow's world, the authors offer careful analyses of the issues that adolescents are likely to face and the kinds of policy decisions that need to be made to deal with education, work, and other issues, intelligently and equitably. We know that the details of how adolescents live their lives and the place of adolescence in the life course have changed markedly over the past two hundred years since the Industrial Revolution (Gillis, 1981; Kett, 1977). We know also that change of an equally dramatic sort has occurred even during the 20th century (Modell, 1989). What we don't know is what further changes will occur as we face yet another transformation in the large social context that constitutes Western society and its globalizing economic and political outreach.

The authors of these chapters present a wealth of evidence that should spark reflection and spur action by researchers, educators, youth advocates, practitioners, and policy makers. It follows from this material that we cannot simply continue the kind of work we have done for the past several decades. If we do, we will have missed the opportunity to create new, more supportive institutions for adolescents' development and allowed unfortunate inequities to expand, dividing further youth who happen to be born in more or less auspicious circumstances.

This volume originates from a symposium held in Boston at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) in February 1996. The symposium brought together researchers from several countries who were investigating community service and civic engagement in youth. Along with us, the participants, who also became contributors to this volume, were Connie Flanagan, Manfred Hofer, and Debi Roker. Lothar Krappmann of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, served as the discussant for the symposium and offered insight by tying the papers together and setting forth future research questions. The symposium was well attended and generated enthusiasm among the participants and audience. We subsequently learned that several members of the audience, including Hans Oswald, Mark Pancer, Mike Pratt, Rachel Seginer, and Keiko Takahashi, were also doing research in this area, and the idea germinated to bring our work together in an edited book.

But our goal was not just to present an international array of empirical research on youth's community service and activism. We also believed that this cross-cultural sampling of research offered insight into an emerging theoretical perspective on the development of civic identity in youth. This perspective emphasizes the formative influence of youth's participation in service and civic activities on their political understanding and future civic engagement. The chapters show several ways that this process is carried out in varying social-historical contexts.

In addition to the participants in the SRA symposium, we are grateful to the other contributors in the book. All of the authors tackled their chapters with great energy and imagination and were highly conscientious in responding to our seemingly endless queries and deadlines.

The chapters in this volume offer portraits of youth's participation in community and civic activities in a range of social–historical contexts. The fresh empirical data presented in these chapters indicate that youth's participation in society varies considerably across time and location. In each context, youth are characterized as active decision makers seeking to understand and find their place in the society in which they were born. But youth do not seek simply to fit themselves within the status quo. As several chapters show, youth in many countries play pivotal roles in challenging the existing order and working to improve social conditions.

In this concluding chapter, we identify recurring themes that transcend the varying contexts presented in this volume. Our purpose is to illustrate the emergence of a more adequate approach to political socialization that goes beyond the simplicity of the internalization model and that accounts for human development occurring within social contexts often filled with ambiguous and conflicting perspectives. Our challenge is to understand how youth come to terms with the complexity of society and its political order and also, ideally, come to believe that they can play a role in shaping its future.

The presentation of themes begins with the concern expressed in many countries that contemporary youth are disconnected from political processes and lack a sense of social responsibility. From here, we tie together findings that present adolescents as active participants in figuring out the workings of society and that pertain to the role of social–historical opportunity in this process, particularly as it is instantiated through adolescents’ social relationships with community organizations, family, and friends.

This book presents a series of portraits of youth's involvement in community service and activism from various cultures and nations. One purpose of this global sampling is to gain an estimate of the political and moral development of contemporary youth insofar as it signifies what to expect from the next generation of citizens as we approach the twenty-first century. An equally important goal of this sampling is to learn more about the ways in which diverse governmental structures and formal socializing institutions affect youth's construction of political-moral identities.

Perhaps because we are approaching the end of the millennium, much hesitancy has been expressed about the present generation of youth and its ability to carry on and help reform our political and moral traditions. Some commentators have bemoaned the universal spread of the modern “youth culture” of MTV, jeans, and fast food around the globe. They also have criticized a rising interest in material possessions, coupling it with a fear that youth have placed hedonistic pleasure ahead of social obligation.

Without denying facts, many of us who study youth professionally believe that the evidence needs to be viewed carefully and that negative cases surely should not be generalized to youth at large. For example, in the United States, crimes against property, by far the largest category of juvenile crime, have held at a steady rate over the past 25 years (Siegel & Senna, 1994), and, although violent juvenile crime has increased in recent years, it still involves a small proportion of all youth (Siegel & Senna, 1994).

The discipline of academic psychology chose long ago to ally itself with the natural sciences and to ground itself in biology. In this regard, the discipline went a separate way from other social sciences such as sociology, which based itself on social and political history. As psychology grew after World War II, it interacted less and less with other social sciences, so that the cumulative effect has been a relative independence in the search for basic laws of human behavior. As long as it was believed that such laws were founded on eons of biological evolution, psychologists needed only to apply proper scientific methods to find and describe them. In recent years, however, this belief has weakened as many psychologists have come to recognize the limits of this view and to acknowledge that society and culture are every bit as fundamental as biology.

This realization has presented psychology with a new problem of trying to find gainful ways to study society and culture. After decades of neglect, psychologists need to develop sophisticated concepts for dealing with them. Two options are either to strive toward workable definitions or to tap into the rich scholarship that the other social sciences provide. The complexity of the task suggests the value of taking the latter path, and were it to be taken, psychologists could build forward from, rather than repeating, the debates that have already gone on within these disciplines.

The concept of reciprocity has played a central role in sociological explanations of social solidarity and social cohesion (Gouldner, 1960; Sahlins, 1965). It has a similar role in social biology through Trivers's (1971) notion of reciprocal altruism. Recent studies of children's friendship indicate that major components of moral or prosocial development appear within this relationship during the preschool period. If reciprocity does indeed prove to be a defining characteristic of friendship (Hinde, 1976; 1979; Youniss, 1980), studies of the development of reciprocity may provide fresh insight into prosocial development that has been overlooked by most theorists.

The aim of this chapter is to present an analysis of the concept of reciprocity, as demonstrated in the development of prosocial behavior in children. First, uses of the concept of reciprocity in sociology and social biology are reviewed; the discussion focuses on aspects of the concept that appear most useful for developmental interest. Next, findings on children's friendships are summarized insofar as they bear on reciprocity and on prosocial behavior. Both reviews are then conjoined in a theoretical analysis in which a distinction is drawn between the child as an individual agent and the child as conceived through membership in interpersonal relationships. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the latter viewpoint both for developmental psychology and for social biology.

Social cohesion

Sociologists face the difficult task of having too many data to explain regarding social behavior.