Nature and Culture, Individual and Society: The Institutional Impact of Conceptual Antithesis in Theories of American Social Sciences on Adolescence

This article presents a sociological analysis, dealing with the matter of how theories of social sciences about adolescence have contributed to the formation of adolescent behavior. In particular, we examine how adolescence as a social category was constituted and transformed along with the modification of social sciences' (psychology's and sociology's mostly) relevant concepts in the USA, from the late 19th century until the early 21st century. Around socialization, two opposite theoretical foundations of human condition were reproduced, the “socio-cultural” and the “individual-natural”. The dominance of some theories on others was related to the institutional consolidation of various social control forms (e.g., symbolic control, surveillance) depending on the kind of behavior that is being rationalized, naturalized and legitimized. The historical reconstruction of three phases in the development of the social sciences' field of symbolic control enables us to focus on the importance of a renewed naturalism in the explanation of adolescent behavior, from the 1980s onwards.