Generation, Discourse, and Social Change

Karen R. Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136662379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie sociale

Just what is a generation? And why, if at all, does it matter? This book asks what generation means to ordinary people, arguing that generation is real and it matters, but not in the ways that we think. Generations are not groups of people who can be categorized and attributed with static, immutable and universal characteristics, nor are they reducible to cohorts, as is the tendency in much social research. Rather, the book reveals generation to be a social phenomenon and a mechanism of social change - as a constellation of ideas and discourses that explains what happens when ideas and ideals collide, and why some discourses flourish and take hold at particular times.

1 Constructing Generation

Finding a scholarly definition of ‘generation’ proved to be a bit like trying to hold on to a handful of sand: the harder I tried to squeeze all of the tiny particulates together, the more they rebelled, slipping through my fingers, refusing to be solidified.¹ Philosophers and social theorists who construct coherent theories of what a generation is, in the abstract, tend to advance ideas that are too amorphous to subject easily to empirical scrutiny. Sociologists who try to study generation with precision, either as a central puzzle in their research or as just one aspect of their problem under investigation, run into problems of their own. With no real orthodoxy on how to define and operationalize generation, researchers tend to manage its evasiveness in one of two ways: either they accept ‘generation’ axiomatically as another word for ‘cohort’ or they acknowledge its innate ambiguity and supply, with apology, a more precise ‘working’ definition.

Like so many imprecise and scientifically frustrating terms in our “everyday lexicon”—Raymond Williams’s famous tango with “culture” comes to mind—generation permeates popular thinking.² It appears with regularity in references to the ‘Baby Boomers,’ ‘Generation X’ or the ‘generation gap’; it finds a place in the articulation of age-related tensions within families, communities and the workplace; it surfaces in pop-culture celebrations of ‘my generation.’ Based on its indefiniteness, it would be easy to write generation off as a myth—something ordinary people accept as fact which falls apart under the social scientific microscope—but doing this would not tell us very much.³ Based on its persistence as an idea in cultures around the world and its continued influence and place in social scientific research, it is clear that whatever generation is in form and content, it is a steadfast feature of contemporary society and a component of our histories.

Still, as a sociologist looking to bring sociological concepts and questions to bear on a concept that has been taken up rather uncritically outside sociology, I am presented with the problem of trying to conduct a study of something I do not know how to find. My task in this chapter is to ask and critically assess how others have found (that is, constructed) generation, given its ambiguity. The review uncovers a rather singular tendency among those who have studied or theorized generation before: they conceive of generations as categories of people, and, subsequently, they are impelled to draw definitive boundaries between them before heading into the field. Here, I propose that in taking such a priori boundaries between generations-as-people into their empirical research, social scientists predetermine many of their findings in ways that warrant further reflection. Moreover, I argue that in treating generations as groups of people, sociologists leave much of generation’s unique potential as a sociological concept undeveloped. Moving away from the generation-as-people perspective, I find one useful, Pragmatically grounded alternative, which I apply to the study of intergenerational differences at work: studying generation as/in discourse.

THEORIES AND SCIENCES OF GENERATION

In their 2002 book, Generations, Culture and Society, June Edmunds and Bryan Turner wrote that in social science, “the study of generations has not played a large part.”⁴ They did not mean that the concept was completely absent, but that it was particularly “neglected [ … ] as an analytical principle” in sociology. Whereas generation certainly featured in the field as “an aspect of social stratification, as a component of any general account of the ageing of populations, or as a feature of theories of social change,” its full potential lay beyond these uses, they wrote, and had largely been unrealized.⁵ Since Edmunds and Turner made this point, it appears that not much has changed.

Certainly, generation continues to play a key role in studies of the family, mainly as a way of framing the relationships between parents, children and grandchildren.⁶ It is similarly deployed in studies of non-familial relationships—as a way of encapsulating in a single word what it means for people to connect with one another across a gap in age, as a means of delineating older and young research participants from one another, or to pinpoint socio-historical shifts in the biographies of individuals.⁷ Then there is the growing number of studies of second-generation immigrants, whose numbers are burgeoning and presenting a challenge to the already-doubtful homogeneity of ethnic categories.⁸ Finally, generation has begun to gain some purchase with academics and other researchers as public policy discussions around workforce aging, post-secondary education, precarious work and public pensions, and as media coverage of youth uprisings in the Middle East, Quebec and even the worldwide Occupy movement have centered on the themes of intergenerational fairness.⁹

Still, Edmunds and Turner’s overall statement holds true: not much use is made of generation as an analytical principle on par with social class or gender, although, defined loosely as the individual’s location at the intersection of biographical and historical time, generation seems to structure our experiences and social locations just as much as those more established social divisions. But those who want to correct the underemployment of generation as an analytical principle in sociology face a slew of complicated questions, the immediate one being: just what is a generation? Beyond that, how does generation impose structure on our experiences and social locations? How does it provide meaning in our accounts of those experiences? Where— that is, on what ontological level—can it be found in real life? Why is it a part of the social world in the first place? Interestingly, extant ‘answers’ to these questions make one common assumption: that the search for empirically identifiable generations in real life is a search for groups or categories of people, whose boundaries are determined in advance, leaving mainly their content and qualities up for empirical exploration. Several of the most common approaches are outlined in the following, beginning with what I have termed ‘the conscious generation.’

The Conscious Generation

Turner and Edmunds’s 2002 definition of generation is one of the most prominent today, apart from the axiomatic usages of generation—as an aspect of social stratification, for example—identified in the preceding. For the authors, generations are defined in relation to major events. They are set apart from cohorts (groups who share a birth year or range of years) in that they require some “major event which leads to collective consciousness” among people who experienced it during roughly the same life stage, “which in turn leads to a ‘cultural legacy’.”¹⁰ This definition leads the authors to make fairly strong statements about what counts as a generation and what doesn’t: Generation X, for example, is “the missing generation” because it did not “do” anything comparable to its predecessors. By the same logic, history itself is “the history of the consciousness of strategic, active generations.”¹¹ Generations thus must embrace and be conscious of their “collective identity” in order to qualify as generations and not simply birth cohorts.¹²

Generation as Aspect of Social Stratification

Oddly, Bryan Turner’s earlier work offers a definition of generation that is different from the ‘conscious generation’ in important ways. In a 1998 debate with UK sociologist Sarah Irwin, Turner defined generation as “a cohort of persons passing through time who come to share a common habitus and lifestyle.”¹³ In addition to the event-centered definitions advanced by other theorists, including his own later work with Edmunds, Turner added “the notion that ‘generation’ also refers to a cohort which has a strategic temporal location to a set of resources as a consequence of historical accident and the exclusionary practices of social closure.”¹⁴ In this formulation, generations are fully realized insofar as they are social strata; their borders are particularly seen in instances of conflict over or unequal access to the same resources.

In her reply to Turner in the British Journal of Sociology, Irwin took issue with the resource-based definition of generation and specifically the idea that temporal location and social closure worked to cohere generations as “communities of interest.”¹⁵ The argument that intergenerational conflict in particular arises because of competing interests was flawed, for Irwin, because different generations alive at the same time are inevitably going to occupy different life stages, which bring with them markedly different interests. In other words, we are not likely to see a generation of seniors in conflict with a generation of young or middle-aged adults over interests, because each of them is not competing for the same, current resources as the others. Irwin’s main objection was that Turner failed to adequately distinguish generational difference as an aspect of the lifetime experience of different generations and generational difference as an aspect of current (age-based) inequalities.¹⁶ I think she was right.¹⁷

Irwin proposed that she and Turner were on the same quest—to place “age and generation within a more adequate theory of inequality and stratification”—but her own work, while highlighting critical flaws in Turner’s, left generation largely in the realm of kinship.¹⁸ Granted, Irwin’s intended object of study was the family, inclusive of ties between older and younger people therein, and in answering Turner, she nonetheless offered an important view on generations outside families. Specifically, she proposed that generation functions as an aspect of social stratification, but that it does so alongside and crosscut by social class, and in terms of “lifetime” life chances and access to resources over the life course.¹⁹

Generation as Mechanism of Social Change

Long before Turner and Irwin’s exchange in the British Journal of Sociology, social philosophers and social scientists were cognizant of (and perplexed by) the centrality of generations to individual experience, social change and historical processes.²⁰ Most contemporary overviews trace the concept to Karl Mannheim’s 1928 work, “The Problem of Generations,” in which generation was offered as a way of encapsulating the unique experiences and corresponding perspectives or worldviews of people born at different times. Addressing the very tension Turner, Edmunds and Irwin would find themselves negotiating over 70 years later, Mannheim argued:

the sociological phenomenon of generations is ultimately based on the biological rhythm of birth and death. But to be based on a factor does not necessarily mean to be deducible from it, or to be implied in it. [ … ] Without history and social structure, generations would cease to exist, and this history and social structure must be taken into account in any definition of or analysis of generation.²¹

In other words, Mannheim argued for a conceptualization of generation as the meeting of socio-historical context and age, which supplied generations, inherently, with “certain definite modes of behavior, feeling, and thought” and restrictions on “the range of self-expression open to the individual.”²²

Like many of his contemporaries, Mannheim was evidently drawn to generation as a “problem” because of the tumultuous historical period he was living through. In Mannheim’s 1920s Germany, young people were joined, seemingly for the first time, in youth movements (some nefarious) that spanned beyond local communities. By the time the essay was published in English in 1952, it would have taken on new significance as “youth culture” seemed to cohere then-young adults into a conscious community that enjoyed the same kinds of music, bought into the same popular culture and dressed in the same styles, all of which were markedly different from the music, cultural artifacts and sartorial choices of older adults, namely, their parents. The very ideas of youth, adolescence and teenagers took on a new cultural significance in the post-war period, as social scientific methods increasingly joined with state apparatuses to deal with populations on an age-graded basis.²³ All of this attention to age, and the related fixation on youth as a paradoxical source of hope and anxiety, meant that the relationships and differences between older and younger people were brought to the fore in social science and public discourse.²⁴ Combined with the modern era perception that social change was taking place at an alarming pace—based on the rise of new technologies and unparalleled affluence in North America—much of the social scientific literature on generations from this time period focused on youth and the role upcoming generations played in social change.

Mannheim’s work, for example, revolved around the idea that each successive generation inherits the world from the previous one, and that in order to understand social change, one has to wrap one’s head around each generation’s unique perspective—the “adversaries” each of them fight and the concepts and categories of thought guiding their actions. He emphasized that while individuals and groups can change their perspectives, values, beliefs and attitudes over time, the introduction of actual new people, in the form of new generations coming into adulthood, presented the possibility of radical social change. For Mannheim, generations did not need to be conscious of themselves—in contrast to Turner and Edmunds’s later definition—but were rather expressed as a sort of accidental harmony, different notes struck at the same time, producing a distinctive “chord” and summing up the “spirit” of people close in age in a particular time and place.²⁵ Thus, to the conceptualizations of generation discussed so far—the conscious generation, the interest group and the aspect of stratification, Mannheim adds the insight that generations come to possess a certain mentality, knowledge of which is essential if the social scientist is interested in understanding social action.²⁶

For others writing around the same time, and for the post-war, social-change-related reasons outlined in the preceding, the process of inheritance and change was most importantly a potential and actual source of conflict between older and younger people. Kingsley Davis, whose work is widely credited in discussions of “the generation gap,” proposed that superiority comes with age, and as younger generations come into adulthood a battle erupts between them and the generation before them, over the power to control the world. The tension, for Davis, is exacerbated by the fact that young people are physically “equal” or even “superior” to older adults long before they possess the socio-political superiority to dictate the terms of social life.²⁷

Yet it was Mannheim’s work that proved most influential, and the definition of generation it advanced continues to find purchase with contemporary social scientists. Lyons, Duxbury and Higgins, for example, take their definition of generation from Mannheim’s writing, accepting that it is “a cohort of individuals born and raised within the same historical and social context, who consequently share a common wor...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Generation, Discourse, and Social Change
• Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Constructing Generation
• 2 Questions, Concepts, Data and Methods
• 3 Generation-as-Discourse in Working Life Stories
• 4 Generational Discourses and Relating to Work
• 5 Why Now? Explaining Generational Discourses around Work
• 6 Explaining Generation-as-Discourse
• 7 Conclusion: Generation and Work as We Know It
• Appendix 1.1: Respondents by Age and Gender
• Appendix 1.2: Demographics
• Appendix 2.1: Interview Guide
• Appendix 3.1: Recruitment Poster
• Notes
• References
• Index