Problematizing a popular panacea: A critical examination of the (continued) use of ‘social generations’ in youth sociology

Introduction

Despite a great deal of conceptual fuzziness and a degree of flexibility, even ambiguity, it is difficult to argue with White’s (2013, p. 216) observation that ‘Often, and increasingly, social and political life is narrated using the concept of generation’. The concept is enjoying substantial popularity, with particular ubiquity in both popular and political discussions and debates about whether and with what consequences contemporary young people face harsher economic conditions than their predecessor generations (e.g. Howker & Malik, 2010; Willetts, 2010; for discussion see Bristow, 2019). These discourses, while interesting, usually lack sophisticated or nuanced readings of young people’s lives or their relationships with other ‘generations’, relying on homogeneous categories that emerge from ideas in marketing: ‘baby boomers’, ‘Generation X’ and ‘millennials’ and the like are then positioned as wholly different to one another, at odds and even in conflict (Bristow, 2019). Contrasting with popular accounts, sociologists use more nuanced devices, often drawing on the seminal writing of Karl Mannheim to suggest the idea of social generations helps make sense of contemporary youth and new forms of generational inequality. Such thinking underpins how recent social change connects young people born in a particular historical period, but who are globally dispersed. These sociological currents are the focus of our article, the primary contribution of which is to make clear that properly attending to the conceptualization of younger generations is a pivotal part of tackling some of the broader questions pertaining to intergenerational relations, tensions and differences.

In particular, we extend upon arguments made by France and Roberts (2015), who situated the prominent and increasingly popular use of the concept of ‘social generation’ in youth sociology as potentially representing a ‘new orthodoxy’. Social generation theory has, regardless, continued to gain prominence. We do not aim to return to the issues raised by France and Roberts (2015), but instead highlight and consider two major issues. First, we tackle and critique a theoretical advance that developed in response to criticisms that the social generation approach is unable to capture and explain social inequality; this is most notably evident in the use of the Bourdieu-inspired notion of a ‘generational habitus’ (see Woodman & Wyn, 2015a). We make clear that this is conceptually problematic. Secondly, we engage with work by a number of other theorists (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2009; Edmunds & Turner, 2005) who conceptualize generations as a phenomenon impacting the lives of all young people around the world, creating a ‘global generation’ that cuts across national boundaries. Here we raise important questions about the ‘global reach’ of a generation and about the transferability and effectiveness of this approach to explain and understand the diverse lives of young people living in the Global South. In moving through both main arguments, we also point to shortcomings in evidence upon which the major theorizing of social generations rests. Highlighting theoretical dilemmas and inconsistencies, issues with empirical application, and, finally, insufficient engagement with and consideration of post-colonial literatures, we contribute to an emerging body of critical social theory that notes the need for caution in the ready uptake and deployment of the concept of generations.

The sociology of generations and its (dis)contents

Underpinned by the seminal writing of Karl Mannheim ¹ and described as having an undervalued legacy in sociology (Pilcher, 1994; Wyn & Woodman, 2006), a ‘generational lens’ has gained substantial traction in youth sociology, where a number of significant writers deployed the idea of ‘social generations’ to make sense of the life worlds of contemporary youth. Here the work of Dan Woodman and Johanna Wyn has been particularly influential (Woodman & Wyn, 2015a; Wyn & Woodman, 2006). While sometimes subject to subtle recalibration (see, for example, Bessant et al., 2017), the overarching emphasis has been on what is new and what binds contemporary young people together, with advocates arguing that:

. . . the concept of generations focuses on the reality that at particular points in time young people face distinctive conditions that require their active engagement in ‘rewriting’ the rules for making a life. (Woodman & Wyn, 2015b, p. 1404)

Accordingly, it is conditions such as the spread of neoliberalism, the rise of digital technologies and the political and economic process of globalization that are creating the foundation for a ‘general worldview or zeitgeist’ (Bessant et al., 2017). This has led to claims that we are seeing the emergence of a global generation (Beck & Beck Gernsheim, 2009; see also Craig et al., 2019).

The academic work leaning on or developing these ideas contrasts to the dominant use and discussion of generation that pervade contemporary political narratives. As Ferreira (2018, p. 136) notes, these latter accounts are popular but incoherent, and that ‘claims concerning the existence of generations and generational changes are surrounded by too much speculation, are too simplistic, and have a universalistic exaggeration, sometimes even contradiction’. Moving away from the narratives or discourses that underpin the generationalism used to discuss crude age cohorts and associated (mostly marketing) labels of ‘baby boomers’, ‘Gen X’, ‘Gen Y’, ‘Gen Z’, etc., the sociological account productively prioritizes the social reality of generations (Ferreira, 2018). That is, the biological rhythm of life, such as birth, ageing and death, is understood as taking place within a set of historical processes that are specific to different cohorts. Given the right conditions, shared sets of beliefs and outlooks could develop and would help these clusters of cohorts construct and see themselves as a ‘generation’ in actuality, recognizing themselves as distinct from past and future generations. In this context, Mannheim argued that generation becomes a powerful source of social, political and cultural change, challenging the idea that change emerges through processes such as class conflict or technological innovation. Here, the notion of generation is seen as similar to social class in terms of its collective orientation or consciousness. Yet, unlike class, it is not linked to economic and power structures of modern societies, but instead most prominently to the interaction of history, an individual’s biography and social location (Aboim & Vasconcelos, 2014; Ferreira, 2018; Pilcher, 1994; Woodman & Wyn, 2015a).

The sociology of youth has unquestionably benefited from this theorizing, particularly its attention to ‘the change processes that allow the induction of socialization conditions that are sufficiently wide and distinct from the past to provide new experiences and to shape new subjectivities between the younger layers of the population’ (Ferreira, 2018, p. 139, our italics; see also Woodman & Wyn, 2015a; Wyn & Woodman, 2006). It is important, here, to recognize that this relationship between generations and social change is examined most often through the actions of young people (Thorpe & Inglis, 2019), who are experiencing a life stage where a generational identity is claimed to become established. The overarching argument is that deploying a social generations approach reveals that each generation shares a ‘script’ of ‘their’ collective development that ‘will continue to shape their lives well into the future when they are no longer youth . . . [and that] Generation Y will always be generation Y – they will not grow out of it – just as baby boomers are always baby boomers’ (Wyn & Woodman, 2006, pp. 496–497).

Importantly, this does not, in principle, preclude attention to emergent divisions within a generation, because while ‘historical dynamics will always translate into generational actualities . . . these are carried forward by active social agents within their respective structural constraints’ (Aboim & Vasconcelos, 2014, p. 166). Making sense of such divisions usually relies on Mannheim’s conceptual device, ‘generational units’. This theoretical apparatus was originally designed for understanding collective social and political mobilization of ‘concrete groups’, and how ‘each generation unit tries to expand its influence on the direction of the whole generation location’ (Purhonen, 2016, p. 107). However, Woodman and Wyn (2015a) have been influential in promulgating the value of the generational unit concept for youth sociologists to think about social differences, indeed inequalities, more broadly. Notably, they suggest the sociology of generations is ‘surprisingly marginal’ to youth sociology given that ‘although inequality was not Mannheim’s major focus, [generational units] provides the basis for a framework that explicitly formulates the problem of the active recreation of divisions in the context of social change’ (Woodman & Wyn, 2015a, p. 59). In sum, they advocate that the value of the sociology of generations is that it,

. . . support[s] investigations of how social division, across multiple dimensions including class, gender, race, sexuality, disability and geographic location, is being made today, in the context of social conditions that differ from those that impacted on the lives of young people in previous generations. (Woodman & Wyn, 2015a, p. 108)

The last part of this quote, in particular, ties into and supports another major and influential component of their theorizing, which is that the sociology of generations facilitates an understanding of how the ‘post 1970s’ generation experience a ‘new adulthood’ (Wyn & Woodman, 2006). This new adulthood is one characterized by fluidity, complexity and status reversibility, rather than one epitomized by youth transitions through a series of status markers on one’s journey to an adulthood destination. Despite the critique of the transitions concept embedded in the ‘new adulthood’ literature, it is also important to note that a large body of scholarship still deploys or defends the concept of transitions to adulthood (e.g. Ferreira, 2018; Moreno & Uracco, 2018; Roberts, 2007, 2010). Similarly, others question the degree of substantive ‘newness’ in the contemporary conditions shaping young lives, relative to other historical periods (Bessant, 2018; France & Roberts, 2017).

Generational theory and Bourdieu: Conceptual advance or conceptual incoherence?

Tackling the question of difference has been a core task for Woodman and Wyn (2015a, 2015b), and they propose that the strength of and necessity for generational theory is to expose the new processes that remake social inequalities in contemporary times. Furthermore, they have been clear that for a Mannheimian sociology to properly theorize young people’s lives, some modification to his approach is required. Accordingly, they have led in providing this modification, buttressing Mannheim with Bourdieu to maximize the effectiveness of social generations theorizing (see Woodman & Wyn, 2015a). Here we want to draw attention to a number of conceptual issues that derive from this pairing.

First, as Purhonen (2016, p. 3) contends, ‘Bourdieu seldom if ever used the concept of generation strictly in the same sense as Mannheim (1952) and later theorists, for whom generation means essentially a social or cultural generation, a potential source of collective identity produced by the shared youthful or young adulthood experience’. Beyond this more overt incompatibility, other theoretical issues persist, and we suggest these are especially visible in discussions on ‘generational units’ and the idea of the creation of a ‘generational habitus’. Both these, we argue, end up being heuristic devices that first and foremostly prop up the possibility of deploying social generations as a concept, rather than primarily being new, central vehicles for explaining young people’s lives.

As noted above, primarily ‘generational unit’ was Mannheim’s (1952, pp. 305–315) device for making sense of different political and intellectual responses to a common experience of a particular historical moment. Rather than inequalities or indeed any mention of social resources, it is the ‘overtly created, partisan integrative attitudes characterizing generation units’ that interests Mannheim (1952, p. 307, our italics). This is consistent with Mannheim’s aims to understand the drivers of social change in relation to the sociology of knowledge. Woodman and Wyn (2015a, p. 73) recognize this, and suggest that with ‘a modified understanding of generational units, we are able to approach questions of continuity and change in the context of transitions and cultures in an alternative way’. Their preferred method for doing so is to utilize the concept of ‘generational habitus’ (Edmunds & Turner, 2005).

Woodman and Wyn’s (2015a) book, which offers their major theoretical treatment of social generations, uses the idea of generational habitus in relation to both ‘generation’ (the whole) and ‘generational unit’ (a segment of the whole). For example, they write that:

. . . a cleft habitus of ‘tensions’ and ‘contraries’ could arise and arguably become common among a new generation – a generational habitus developed by people living in a world infused and shaped by an awareness of rapid change and in which, to varying extents, people must manage a proliferation of contradictory rules and guidelines. (Woodman & Wyn, 2015a, p. 66)

This statement could arguably refer to generational units or actualities. A few pages later, it appears it is both, despite the goal of the paragraph being to cement the possibility for maintaining a focus on intra-generational differences:

. . . habitus provides a tool for thinking about the subjective, embodied and affective dimension of generations, and generational units, which moves beyond Mannheim’s focus on a conscious sense of belonging to a political generation. (Woodman & Wyn, 2015a, p. 73)

We think there is tremendous value in using Bourdieu’s concepts to understand youth’s contemporary condition (France & Roberts, 2017), and we do not wish to diminish these important efforts to modify social generation theory to facilitate focus on difference. Yet, at the very least, whether generational differences can be so readily identified in habitus requires stronger evidence (Purhonen, 2016). Moreover, the descriptions of how generational habitus might operate seem limited to how habitus works without its generational prefix. For example:

. . . [given] expectations connected to social identities of various kinds that face this generation, many young people will likely need to fall back, creatively, on their dispositions, their ‘feel for the game’, no matter how poor this ‘feel’ may be for the situation they face or how contradictory the pull of their various dispositions. (Woodman & Wyn, 2015a, p. 68)

The value of habitus, and linking the generational experience of youth to the unfolding life course, is that it reminds researchers that this constant reworking of dispositions will be on the basis of the cognitive styles, inclinations, and habits that were previously established by this and previous generations. (Woodman & Wyn, 2015a, p. 70)

Both these quotes echo how Bourdieu describes practice: i.e. always ‘the product of a dialectical relationship between a situation and a habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1972, p. 261), with habitus being ‘individual and group history sedimented in the body, social structure turned mental structure and sensorimotor engine’ (Wacquant, 2018, p. 530). Here we must recognize that the attention to history and historical moments that the generational theorists are keen to bring back to the proverbial table, is already at the table. Indeed, as Wacquant (2018, p. 528) makes plain, Bourdieu offers a triple historicization of ‘the agent (habitus), the world (social space and fields) and of the categories and methods of the social analyst (reflexivity)’. Of further relevance, Wacquant (2018, p. 532) describes habitus as ‘suited to analysing crisis and change no less than cohesion and perpetuation’. This conceptualization, perhaps unlike the generations model’s prioritization of the historical moment, is one that is well attuned to understanding history as a variety of overlapping forces rather than a simple series of chronologically distinct slices (Kertzer, 1983, p. 132).

The concept of generational habitus, like other collective notions of habitus, is ‘merely a label for describing the family resemblances between individuals situated in a certain section of social space’ (Atkinson, 2011, p. 337). As a short-hand heuristic it offers analytic value in grouping people together, but this can also ‘threaten to throttle analysis of the very things [habitus is] intended to comprehend: specificity, complexity and difference’ (Atkinson, 2011, p. 338). In the case of generational habitus, the core relational component of Bourdieu’s sociology goes missing – there is no to very little discussion of field in the context of generational habitus in youth sociology. ² This is somewhat fatal because a habitus only exists in relation to the complex of fields and social spaces in which it is embedded; individuals are located in fields, not generations.

To offer an example, consider that many advocates of social generations point to the massification of higher education as being a distinctive generational reality. There appears to be a consensus that ‘young generations “will get less out of their qualification than the previous generation would have got” – or collective deskilling – which may, in turn, generate a level of disenchantment that spreads across that generation’ (Bessant et al., 2017, p. 101). However, while generation advocates do not overlook inequalities in contemporary higher education, a key issue is that any wholesale cross-generational comparison of the educational–employment nexus is misleading.

The logic of a generational deskilling is problematic because the return on investment is historically and contextually specific. We ought not automatically expect parity of outcome in respect of attaining higher education qualifications between 1975, when, for example, the baby boomer generations would have been graduating, and only 5% of Australians held a bachelor degree (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2013), and, say, 2017, when 45% of women and 32% of men aged 25–29 years had attained a bachelor degree (ABS, 2017). Yet, such comparison is regularly made, often in the same breath as reporting on educational inequalities in access and attainment. In making this incommensurate comparison, education deflation is signified as a crude and level process, such that attention is dragged away from the fact that the ‘educational system is a vehicle for privileges’ (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 99). It is these privileges, or potentially their erosion, that ought be front and centre of enquiry. To make generational comparisons of this ilk it is necessary instead to compare the middle class, elite and privileged of 1975 – i.e. the large swathe of the small number of bachelor degree holders – with their comparable contemporary counterparts. The educational returns to a first class honours degree for a white upper middle class man in 1975 are non-comparable with similar qualifications for an indigenous woman graduating from a ‘new’ university in the first decades of the 21st century. As Bourdieu (1993, pp. 97–98) notes, ‘a qualification is always worth what its holders are worth, a qualification that becomes more widespread is ipso facto devalued, but it loses still more of its value because it becomes accessible to people “without social value”’. Those misrecognized as imbued with social value will mostly likely retain the ‘return’ to educational credentials, much in the ways that the 5% did in 1975. To be able to test for a generational habitus or to even assess it as a mechanism demands a comparison of parts of the generation with a comparable individual habitus and stocks of capital, and an interrogation of how this enables such people to engage with the field of higher education.

Our point here is to ask what social generations adds for youth sociologists. We are using Bourdieu to make clear that sociology has both the tools to do the job of historicizing young people’s unequal experiences, and already does it very well. Suggestions to the contrary rely on a misreading that situates youth sociology as ahistorical (France & Roberts, 2015). Advocating the concept of the generational habitus helps to shore up the sociology of generations for the way contemporary youth sociologists might need, but ultimately feels a little like the ‘emperor’s new clothes’. Habitus can stand alone without generation theory, but not vice versa. Similarly, generational theorists’ calls for greater attention to the specific social and political conditions that affect a generation echo other established sociological principles. These include Wright Mills’ (1959, p. 4) much heralded contention that ‘No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey’ (see also France & Roberts, 2015). We suggest, then, that what is on offer from social generations advocates is part of what Atkinson (2011, p. 344), discussing boarder developments in Bourdieusian theorizing, describes as the ‘trap of fashioning concepts for the sake of neatness or synthesis rather than explanation and illumination of concrete processes’.

While our major focus here is to offer a sustained critique, we want to point towards some potential productive avenues for ongoing theorizing in youth sociology, especially if it is to retain a ‘generational bent’. In respect of better incorporating Bourdieu, a more productive option than generational habitus might be to consider generational doxa. For Bourdieu, doxa represents the taken-for-granted and accepted rules of any given field, and it seems that the contestations, continuations and/or contemporary navigations of these might offer a generations approach something more fruitful. This is but a tentative suggestion for future empirical testing, because if for no other reason, as above, the original conceptualization of habitus already is sensitive to historicizing. Nonetheless, investigating doxa, as it applies to specific fields, provides access to an account in a generalized sense of ‘what is done’. It also provides a way to think about intra-generational difference, given that it at the same time offers ‘the key means through which unity and unanimity, the sense that people are “the same” as one another in some respect or “belong” to the same entity or field, is achieved in the face of difference’ (Atkinson, 2011, p. 340, our italics).

A further fundamental issue, where Bourdieu might be useful, regards the mechanism by which generations comes into focus. Some scholars suggest that it is almost impossible to have a sociology of generations that is at least in part not imbued with crude generationalism (Purhonen, 2016; see also France & Roberts, 2015). But, borrowing from Bourdieu, Purhonen (2016, p. 110) suggests one way to avoid this conflation could be for generational theorists to first recognize that what they study is ‘generations on paper’. Doing so would overt the ‘quasi-magical power to name and to make-exist by virtue of naming’ (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 729), and allow the focus to be turned instead to by whom and/or how generations come to be named, represented and divided. Furthermore, through this process ‘the very relationships between the elites of a generation and other parts of the age cohorts should [and could] be taken as the object of careful analysis’ (Purhonen, 2016, p. 108).

Putting ‘generational units’ to use (or not) to understand inequality

In addition to our critique of generational habitus, we want to return briefly to the issue of generational units, and in particular how this concept has (not) featured in the empirical research findings of those who have most promoted it. This is perhaps most evident in much of the writing emerging from the Life Patterns study, a three-decade research programme that longitudinally explores responses of two generations of young Australians to social change, and upon which Woodman and Wyn’s (2015a, 2015 b) theorizing rests. We explore issues in the research sample below, but here speak to the empirical reporting and the absence of generational units as an analytical device to make sense of inequality (see above).

First, the reported findings offer much less attention to material inequality than the intention set out in the extracts above. This criticism does not extend to analyses of gender, which receives considerable productive attention as a unitary variable (see, for example, Wyn et al., 2017b). Still, though, the work appears to lack the intersectional analysis vividly promised in the promoting of a method and theory that purports to unpack ‘the complex intertwining of change and continuity in the production of inequality in the lives of contemporary young people’ (Woodman & Wyn, 2015a, p. 7). Indeed, mention of generational units is very much absent (including in work published at the time of our writing: see Chesters et al., 2019; Woodman, 2019). Further, the lack of information on parental background and resources and the reduction of individual employment data to contract status (see Chesters et al., 2018, p. 19), which is no indicator of income and socio-economic status, both ensure that any serious investigation of inequality and of the much heralded generational unit remains out of reach.

The recent Life Patterns research findings (non-academic) reports offer further problems here that, in our view, even if inadvertently, prop up popular generationalism, despite its overt distancing from such positions. We recognize that research reports that emerge from the study are less likely to be grounded in theory; nonetheless, they have important theoretical and practical implications. The reports, restricted here to those published after France and Roberts’ (2015) critique of social generation theory, regularly and frequently use generation and cohort interchangeably, often in the same paragraph (see the three reports: Chesters et al., 2018; Crofts et al., 2016; Wyn et al., 2017a). Shifting from one label to another in this way has long been criticized in sociology (see Kertzer, 1983). Not only can a generation not be distinguished by age – researchers are tasked with disentangling the effects of age, life stage, cohort and period – but the Life Patterns project offers mostly conflation, often resulting in comparison of different points in the life stage, not generational differences. Moreover, the closest the Life Patterns research reports come to offering significant insight on intra-generational differences is the 2018 output, which states that ‘It has not been our intention to present these two cohorts as homogenous and undifferentiated groups’ (Chesters et al., 2018, p. 17). Here, analysis of different variables is offered within the two cohorts, with some attention given to difference in attitudes to ‘the most important issues facing Australia’ (e.g. environment, jobs and job security, housing, health) by gender, education, marital status and parent status. Additionally, attributions to qualitative comments include age, occupation and a broad geographic rural/urban indicator. There is still, though, no mention of generational units, and the intersection of various dimensions of difference is not discussed. Further, despite noting that studies of young people’s lives have ‘a tendency to neglect the role of families in transitions, and thus, to underplay the increasing intergenerational support many young people require to thrive in material and emotional spheres’ (Chester et al., 2018, p. 16), the central role of the flow of resources between familial generations is given little attention. While it emerges sparsely across the reports in relation to some qualitative interviews, it is not a sustained feature of the analysis.

While we are critical of how generational units have been used (or not) in youth sociology to understand inequality, there are various possibilities that offer more productive ways of working with the concept. These emerge especially from engaging with those proponents of social generations working outside of the sociology of youth, but who remain committed to understanding generational units as drivers in or representative of social change. For instance, Aboim and Vasconcelos (2014) note that a unit cannot be made to mean simply everything that is different, but that more attention can be given to ‘the increasing opportunities for individuals to participate in a large array of units, or rather, social circles, which are not necessarily generational units or even crystallized ones’ (Aboim & Vasconcelos, 2014, p. 173). Beyond this, as an empirical example, Roberts (2018) uses generational units as an analytic heuristic to show the differences in ‘doing’ masculinity among working-class men (see also Aboim, 2010).

The ‘global turn’ in the study of generations

Our last substantive critique turns to the deployment of generation as a unifying device for theorizing contemporary global youth. First articulated in Edmunds and Turner’s (2005) work on the globalizing possibilities of transnational media flows, the concept of social generations has been powerfully pushed forward in arguments for a cosmopolitan sociology in the work of Beck (2008) and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2009). One core element of the argument is that ‘for the first time in history the rising generations of all countries, nations, ethnic groups, religions are living in a common present’ (Beck, 2008, p. 206, italics in original), part of which is an extensive flexibilization and heightened insecurity of economies. Beck argues that we must analyse ‘a multiplicity of global generations that appear as a set of intertwined transnational generational constellations’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2009, p. 25). This also borrows from Mannheim, given that it points to the possibility of different impulses and responses within a global generation, but who are united and oriented to one another regardless of place or space. Woodman and Wyn (2015a, p. 159) also note that this ‘enables us to recognise cross-border interactions between young people in different parts of the world and cultural links across different parts of the world’. Others in youth sociology talk in these globalizing ways despite attempting to avoid a homogenizing outlook as they raise questions about the impact of globalization. For instance, Ferreira (2018, p. 149), reflecting on the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and subsequent austerity measures in many countries around the world, states that young people ‘find conditions to be fast and efficiently shared on a transnational scale, potentializing the creation of a global generational conscience’.

As above, explanations for what is creating this generational global identity focus on changing economic and political process over the last 30 years. For example, Andres and Wyn (2010), when explaining the similarities of results from the longitudinal programmes in Canada and Australia, locate a new form of generational experience that is evident in both countries as ‘caused’ by the interplay between the growth of the ‘risk society’ and political evolution of ‘neoliberalism’. This ‘neoliberal zeitgeist’, as described by Bessant et al. (2017), is understood to have fundamentally reconstructed the work, educational and lifestyle opportunities and choices of the young. While the impact of neoliberalism and ‘risk’ is felt as stronger in the Anglo Saxon counties, these impacts are seen as creating a universal experience of what it means to be young that transcends national boundaries (Bessant et al., 2017).

The problem of (who is included as part of the) ‘global’ generations

Claims of ‘global reach’ and the emergence of a cross-national generational identity and experiences should be read with caution. To begin, the major evidence base of these claims, especially within youth sociology, does not capture the diversity of young people’s experience and also over-states what is happening. For example, Andres and Wyn (2010) undertook a cross-national analysis of young people’s lives who were born in the 1970s in Canada and Australia. While these two longitudinal studies (the Pathways on Life project in Canada and the Life Patterns study in Australia) were developed independently, they each claimed to show the ‘the making of a generation’. That this occurred across international boundaries was used as the evidence that neoliberal policies and practices, combined with the growth of the ‘risk society’ experienced in Australia and Canada, were creating a similar generational experience for young people.

Yet, of concern in this analysis is what is missing. While the authors acknowledge the ‘gaps’ in their data and analysis, significant limits exist that undermine the claim we are seeing generations in the making. First, while both studies are linked to different countries, the samples collected are local in nature. The Canadian study is based in the province of British Columbia and the Australian study in the state of Victoria. They are in fact very regional studies. Secondly, the samples of each study remains small and unrepresentative. For example, the Canadian study had a sample size of 733 for analysis while the Australian sample was 625. While these figures seem sufficient, substantial problems are present in diversity across both samples. As Andres and Wyn (2010) state, their sample ‘bias favours women’ (p. 15) and participation from indigenous and ‘same-sex’ attracted people were too small to enable a valid analysis. Indeed, ethnicity in general is absent from the analysis.

We can look more carefully, too, at the Australian Life Patterns study, which has grown in influence in terms of showing generations in the making. It now comprises of two cohorts, those who left secondary school in 1991 and those who left secondary school in 2006. The two groups are described in various reports as roughly equating respectively to the popular terms Generation X and Generation Y (see Chesters et al., 2018; Crofts et al., 2016; Wyn et al., 2017a). This has allowed the researchers to compare ‘two generations’. Although rather than reflecting the diversity of generations, the sample is comprised of two cohorts that are over 70% bachelor degree or above educated, and both nearly 70% female. The enormous disproportionately highly educated profile leaves the study open to the same critiques that were targeted at Mannheim regarding only focusing on a relative few to explain generational change (see Aboim & Vasconcelos, 2014).

Of course capturing diversity in longitudinal studies is always methodologically challenging. Getting nationally representative samples, and being able to follow young people after formal schooling and ensuring representation is always hard to manage and will inevitably lead to attrition and a lack of representativeness. But given such studies are very localized in their focus within their countries of origin, the claim that such research gives a ‘voice’ or perspective to ‘generations’ seems a flagrant over-stretch. What they do show is a particular experience of a section of young people in Australia and Canada as they progress through the life course. How this equates to the experiences beyond their geographical boundaries or the particular social groups that are not represented remains difficult to claim.

‘Global generations’ and the Global South

Again putting aside this critique of how local rather than nationally representative those samples are, Philipps alerts us to how the dominance of sociological knowledge in the Global North constructs our understanding of youth around concepts embedded in a few localized regions and states:

All talk about today’s ‘global youth’ notwithstanding, data on young people are still mostly collected and evaluated in the Global North, and youth studies concepts, theories, and approaches, while often treated as universally valid, are in fact locally specific, i.e., rooted in European, North American, and Australian historical experiences and conceptualizations of youth. (Philipps, 2018, p. 4)

What tends to be ignored or unrecognized is that the Global North accounts for around 10% of the global youth population (Population Reference Bureau, 2017). As Cooper et al. (2019) suggest, serious questions need to be asked about the transferability and usefulness of Northern theories to understand the lives of young people in Africa, Latin America and developing countries in Asia. Philipps (2018) further suggests that when social science focuses it ‘gaze’ on the Global South it tends to equate ‘African youth’ with a whole continent, giving limited attention to diversity and difference across and within Africa’s 54 countries. A similar issue also exists in countries normally defined as belonging to the Global North that have been colonized (i.e. Australia, New Zealand and Canada). In these contexts, indigenous populations are seen in much of the literature and data analysis processes as homogeneous. Yet, major differences exist that structure the life experiences and life worlds of these ethnic groups. It other words, research often fails to recognize the nuanced ways that the ‘local’ operates within the lives of these social groups. For example, in Aotearoa New Zealand over 100 Māori iwi (local tribes) exist across New Zealand. While there are important similarities (e.g. in language), there are major historical and cultural differences. To talk of ‘Māori youth’ without recognizing this diversity within Aotearoa, is to ignore the histories and cultural norms that can and do operate in their everyday lives (France et al., 2018). Mannheim’s precondition that generations had to be born within the same social, historical region and share common cultural identity does not work in this context. It fails to understand how the notion of generation works in Māori culture, where whakapapa (genealogy), tikanga (customs and protocols) and whanaungatanga (relationships) are of great importance. At the heart of the Māori life world is a belief in intergenerational relations both as a source of culture, knowledge and understanding of the past the present and the future and as a mechanism of maintaining such knowledge for future generations. The idea that youth may be disconnected from this, and ‘form’ a particular generational identity that is not connected to their life worlds ignores what it means to be Māori. Further, to suggest that they share a ‘common cultural identity’ with the dominant Pākehā New Zealanders (those related to the first white settlers and colonizers) is to ignore colonial history and its impact today on Māori youth. Being colonized saw Māori culture virtually destroyed and given very little recognition in the official ‘way of life’ in Aotearoa New Zealand (Smith, 1999). Philipps (2018) raises similar questions about the usefulness of the concept of generation when looking at the urban protests of groups of African youth in Guinea and Uganda, noting that ‘similar events locally meant very different things because youth and generational change were conceived differently in their respective contexts’ (Philipps, 2018, p. 14).

This raises major challenges to the idea of a ‘common cultural’ understanding of what it means to be a generation. It requires any analysis to give greater attention to recognizing differences rather than similarities. That said, we, like Philipps (2018), acknowledge that young people across the globe face a different world to those who have gone before. Over the past two decades, a rising numbers of globalized events have impacted on the young: the expansion of the internet, the Global Financial Crisis, the rise of the transnational movement of people and the growing anxieties over climate change. These events clearly create a sense of connectedness between young people across national borders. Yet, such developments challenge Mannheim’s idea of local social and historical units as a useful way to study a generation, suggesting that in fact transnational developments may be more important in helping form a generational connection. However, Philipps (2018) warns us that we should be ‘wary of the notion of globalization as homogenization’ or that the ‘increased intercultural contact will imply some form of cultural identity’ or ‘cultural levelling’ of young people’s experiences (Philipps, 2018, p. 3). As he goes on to write:

Young people come into contact anew not only with their own region’s history, but with entangled histories whose origins are scattered across the globe. To different degrees and through different means, they harness and hybridize a diversity of cultural inventories to navigate a world that simultaneously becomes more interconnected and less capable of silencing long-standing inequities. (Philipps, 2018, p. 3)

This idea is further developed by Thorpe and Inglis (2019), who illustrate how research in the Global South illuminates the limitations of a ‘generational consciousness’. In much theorizing about generations, the work of Edmunds and Turner (2005) is significant. They argued that major events, such as attack on the Twin Towers in New York (9/11), will have created a common experience or ‘shared consciousness’ amongst young people at that historical moment that helps them form a sense of being a part of a generation. Concerns over this idea were raised by France and Roberts (2015) in their suggestion that there is little evidence that young people identify with a ‘generational consciousness’, given that Edmunds and Turner assessed generational differences and similarities more through an intergenerational lens. Thorpe and Inglis (2019) further suggest that the idea of global events such as 9/11 are not always global in their impact:

Just because 9/11 is known about by people of the same age cohort in, for example, Buenos Aires and Jakarta, there is presumably nothing intrinsic to that event or its diverse forms of mediation which must necessarily, or even possibly, create a shared sense of generational membership among such people. (p. 50)

In such light, Edmunds and Turner’s claims seem questionable. Indeed, Thorpe and Inglis (2019) suggest that rather than ideas of a global generational identity existing objectively, it is at the subjective level where differences are really identifiable. The example they use is the work of Artini et al. (2011), who looked at the relationship between the upwardly mobile, well-educated Indonesian cruise ship workers and the less well-educated working and lower middle class young white Australian holiday-makers who go on such cruises. Clearly, these two groups have similarities such as both being major users of digital media, they wear similar branded clothes and they both work in precarious forms of employment. But stark differences result from young Indonesian workers being located in the Global South and the young Australians being from the Global North. As Thorpe and Inglis (2019, p. 55) consider, ‘are these shared elements sufficiently strong or similar enough – beyond superficial resemblances – for us really to talk of both groups as part of the same generation? Saying that they are members of different generational units of one generation does not really answer that question. It works to obfuscate the question.’

Conclusion

While recognizing and valuing the commitment of social generation advocates to understanding the relationship between social change and social inequality, in this article we have raised several concerns about the empirical and theoretical dilemmas and tensions that exist within the approach. Complementing and advancing critical scholarship on social change, our concern is to advocate for a theoretically robust sociology of youth that can properly tackle questions pertaining to contemporary intergenerational relations and tensions, and issues of power and inequality.

Our critique has suggested that theorists of social generation in youth sociology do not turn theoretical claims into reality when analysing young people’s lives. While social generation advocates actively distance from ideas that generations are defined by birth dates, such ideas and terms permeate their reporting of findings. Such research also often reduces analysis to cohorts that are not representative of national or international youth demographics. We also suggested that a failure to make concepts such as ‘generational units’ properly operationalized for theoretical modelling is problematic. Similarly, the notion of ‘a ‘generational habitus’ does not address the question of inequality, and, as we have argued, is theoretically incoherent, at odds with Bourdieu’s insistence on the importance of locating habitus in fields and in relationship to capitals, and remains blind to the triple historicization already built into Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus. This leaves it a redundant concept. Nonetheless, if theoretical innovation is required for thinking through generational issues, we have suggested that generational doxa might be an avenue for empirical investigation and conceptual development. Similarly, rather than a wholesale abandonment of ‘generational units’, we have pointed to the work of other scholars that lays the foundation for thinking productively about how young people traverse different generational units.

Finally, we have raised questions about the ‘global reach’ of generations suggesting that the claims made lack substance and demand caution. While there has clearly been significant social change, suggesting that this creates a global sense of generational identity or consciousness fails to recognize the importance of the local context or of the diversity of experience within diverse groups. If social generation theory is going to be a valuable tool for analysing the experience of young people and for offering meaningful insights into questions of generational conflict, it must be made clear how the core theoretical tools give us greater insight. Further, it must also explain the experience of the other 90% of the global youth population living in the Global South.