ABSTRACT
My first contact with Coleman's work occurred at the University of Chicago, where I spent the fall of 1959 as a visiting professor at the Comparative Education Center. My sociology colleague Arnold Anderson gave me a report written for the US Office of Education by a young assistant professor by the name of James S.Coleman, who was at the time in the process of leaving Chicago for an associate professorship at Johns Hopkins. The report dealt with a study, supported by a grant from the US Office of Education, which Coleman had conducted in a number of high schools and later published in his book The Adolescent Society (1961). Since fifteen years earlier I had myself submitted a dissertation in psychology on adolescence at my home university of Lund in Sweden I read the report with particular interest. It proved to be a seminal work on youth culture, which provided a much better understanding of adolescence than the psychologists so far had been able to advance. I wrote an extremely positive review of the report for a Swedish journal.
