The construction of an Albanese scheme and an Albanese map for proper and geometrically irreducible schemes over a perfect field goes back to the work of Chevalley, to this talk of Serre, and to Grothendieck, e.g. Theorem 3.3. in FGA Exp.VI . The idea is always to look at the dual of an appropriate component of the Picard scheme. One just have to pile enough conditions on the setup to ensure that the Picard functor is representable.
One thing that should be said here is that the Albanese scheme is not in general an abelian scheme but only a torsor over a semi-abelian scheme. Also if we drop the properness condition or consider our original scheme to be defined over a base scheme things become more interesting. In full generality it is possible to define an Albanese 1-motive over the base scheme (it is a complex of sheaves of abelian groups of small amplitude with typically representable cohomology) which has the desired universal property. There are various techniques for construction of this derived version of the Albanese scheme. Some use characteristic zero, resolution of singularities, and Nagata compactifications, and some use simplicial scheme resolutions. There are many cool works in this direction, e.g. the paper of Barbieri-Viale and Srinivas , and the more recent papers of <a href="http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9804042v3> Niranjan Ramachandran and Ayoub and Barbieri-Viale . The appendix of Mochizuki's paper mentioned in Lars' post is alos excellent.