Social Generation Theory: Cultural Turn In Generational Theory

Cultural Turn in Generational Theory

In the last two decades, there has been a revival in generational theorizing by a handful of scholars outside the United States. Inspired by the cultural turn in the social sciences, these scholars have brought a more explicitly cultural perspective to bear on Mannheim’s original formulation of “The Problem of Generations”. Scholars have thus begun to theorize the generation concept in Bourdieuian terms of “habitus, hexis, and culture” (Eyerman and Turner, 1998), “cultural fields” (Gilleard, 2004), and in terms of “cultural circles” (Corsten, 1999). The Bourdieuian influence can be seen when Eyerman and Turner describe the generation as “a mode of distinction” and when Gilleard describes the generation as

For example, research in collective memories shows that people of all ages, when asked to name important events in the past 50 years, tended to name events that occurred during adolescence or early adulthood and that were especially important in the area of the country in which they lived (Griffin, 2004; Jennings and Zhang, 2005; Schuman and Scott, 1989). Other works have shown that people’s memories and understanding of the past are shaped by both their subjective experiences and the social context of the present (Roberts and Lang, 1985; Schwartz, 1996). Several types of political and collective identities have also been shown to be affected by prominent events or societal trends that occurred during people’s formative years, and that those identities remain fairly stable over time (Alwin and Krosnick, 1991; Hout and Fischer, 2002; Schnittker, Freese and Powell, 2003; Weil, 1987). Finally, people’s perceptions of age-differences in society (Edmunds and Turner, 2002; Scott, 2000; Vincent, 2005) and in the workplace (Down and Reveley, 2004; McMullin, Comeau and Jovic, 2007) shape a variety of values, attitudes, discourses, and