Youth Social Policy

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Journal of Youth Studies

ISSN: 1367-6261 (Print) 1469-9680 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjys20

Class, gender and generation matter: using the concept of social generation to study inequality and social change

Dan Woodman & Johanna Wyn

To cite this article: Dan Woodman & Johanna Wyn (2015) Class, gender and generation matter: using the concept of social generation to study inequality and social change, Journal of Youth Studies, 18:10, 1402-1410, DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2015.1048206

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1048206

Published online: 20 Jul 2015.

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Class, gender and generation matter: using the concept of social generation to study inequality and social change

Dan Woodmana* and Johanna Wynb

aSchool of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia; bMelbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

(Received 19 December 2014; accepted 1 May 2015)

This article highlights how concepts from the sociology of generations can facilitate new understandings of the processes by which social inequalities are made and perpetuated in the lives of young people. There is a tendency in some youth research for inequality to be conceptualised too simplistically, as a process of reproduction that remains stable over time. Hence, continuing inequality is weighed as evidence against theories proposing social change. Using the sociology of generations, the article argues that social change and new risks are not facades behind which more real, and long- standing, forms of inequality are hidden, but are central to the way inequalities, including but not only by class, gender and race, are made in the conditions facing emerging generations of young people.

Keywords: generation; social class; gender; inequality; social change

Introduction

The concept of generation is used for building an understanding of the distinctive nature of youth and young adulthood, and of age transitions in a context of social change (Buckingham and Willett 2006; May and Muir 2015). Conceptions of generation that draw on the sociological tradition of Mannheim ([1923] 1952) locate the social generational dynamic firmly within the interaction of social conditions and individual subjectivities. From this perspective, generation can provide an insight into the ways in which social dynamics and inequalities around gender, and class (among others including race, sexuality and ability) are reinvented, under conditions that can mask these dynamics, creating what are often paradoxical patterns. In Australia, the increasing pay gap between men and women provides an example of this (ABS 2012). Despite the fact that women are more likely to participate in post-secondary education than men, their educational ‘success’ is not rewarded in the workforce.

Not all uses of generation are in this sociological tradition. Others are more ‘psychological’ in their focus and tend to make broad claims about uniform attitudes and dispositions across a generation. For example, Gardner and Davis (2013) argue that an ‘App Generation’ has emerged, in which life has become characterised through the lens of an ‘app’, transforming the nature of identity, intimacy and imagination for young people. These approaches to generation tend to emphasise transformative and universal changes in young people ‘attitudes’ relative to their predecessors (see also Twenge’s

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Journal of Youth Studies, 2015 Vol. 18, No. 10, 1402–1410, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1048206

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

(2006) concept of a narcissistic generation). Such ‘generationalism’ is also common in popular uses of generation in the media.

Sociologically informed concepts of social generation have greater nuance, oriented towards understanding the way in which social conditions create distinctive opportunities and risks that young people must navigate – often with very different outcomes. This means that young people develop distinctive generational subjectivities that, regardless of their gender, locational or socio-economic circumstances, link them to their social generation, but it does not make them all the same. A social generation may be distinctive, but it is not necessarily ‘transformative’ and cannot be captured under a single label based on a practice (like app use) or a personality type or pathology (like ‘narcissism’).

These observations serve as a backdrop to our discussion of the uses and misuses of the concept of social generation in youth studies. In this article we clarify the value we see in the concept of social generations for researching inequality. Our discussion takes place against the backdrop of some provocative claims made in a recent article in this journal by Alan France and Steven Roberts (2015), who mount a critique of our body of work.1 While they see value in developing alternatives to the ‘transitions and cultures’ approaches that have dominated youth studies in recent decades, France and Roberts (2015, 216) see a potentially dangerous ‘new orthodoxy’ in a generations approach, using our work as the main source of evidence. Like others, they note differences and disagreements between scholars of generations about how to define a generation but their primary concern is that the use of a concept of social generation in youth studies would replace traditional theoretical repertoires that highlight the reproduction of inequalities, particularly class-based approaches. There is, however, little dispute in the recent sociological literature on generations of the continuing importance of class analysis, and this is particularly the case in youth studies. In our own work we have used the concept of generations explicitly to assist thinking about how class, gender and other forms of inequality shape young lives in changing circumstances.

Our discussion of necessity, given the sustained focus on our work by France and Roberts, addresses their argument and their misrepresentations of our position. However our aim is to contribute to furthering a productive debate in youth studies about the frameworks that best equip us to document, understand and address the injuries of social change. We elaborate on how our use of the concept of generations is evolving, expanding on the substantial commonalities between France and Roberts’ position and ours.2 However, their article raises some issues for youth studies that go beyond their critique of the sociology of generations. Their claim that social change is simply a continuation of social processes that began with the emergence of capitalism in the eighteenth century highlights a significant issue for youth studies. For France and Roberts, to focus on generations is to distract youth scholars from where the real (class) action is. This claim resonates strongly with the early work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, where class analysis reigned. Then, as now, this take on class analysis risks marginalising the analysis of gender, race and the relationship between different regions of the world.

Revisiting the case for and against a social generations approach

During the 1990s, the idea that youth was a life phase that had become ‘extended’ (‘extended adolescence’, youth ‘on hold’, ‘emerging adulthood’) gained substantial

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currency in youth studies. Yet the longitudinal data from the Life Patterns study in Australia that we were analysing suggested that something different was happening – both youth and adulthood were undergoing a transformation as social relations and economies underwent significant shifts. Rather than youth becoming ever extended, we saw a ‘new adulthood’ emerging (Dwyer and Wyn 2001; Wyn and Woodman 2006). The concept of generation gave us a way to conceptualise this shift, gaining purchase on the close interrelationship between these societal changes (increasingly global in nature) and the nature and experience of youth. We saw young people with widely divergent resources at their disposal develop strategies to navigate common imperatives (e.g. the trend towards non-standard work hours and precarious work; credentialism; increases in the costs of education), often with very different outcomes.

For example, young people in wealthier families were able to draw on family networks to source part-time jobs with standard hours, and these young people were more frequently able to exercise discretion in the kinds of jobs they accepted. Their peers in less wealthy families were more likely to be caught in non-standard working hours, working in jobs that negatively impacted on other parts of their lives, including study and relationships (Woodman 2012). Recognising such differences in patterns of study and work, our data suggested that a generational shift was under way, one that distinguished the young people leaving school in the 1990s and 2000s from the youth of the previous generation. A 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. At such times young people face new demands to ‘invent’ youth and young adulthood (Henderson et al. 2007).

Along with other authors who use frameworks that emphasise a relational understanding of youth, we argue that changing patterns of work, study, relationships and leisure point to new socio-historical economic and policy formations that are more significant than a change in the timing of transitions or shift in the form of youthful cultural practices. The past decades have reshaped youth and importantly, the nature of the adulthoods young people can reasonably aspire to (Mizen 2004; Wyn and Woodman 2006; Blatterer 2007; Woodman and Wyn 2013). To recognise these new generational conditions enables a holistic view of society and social change, potentially augmenting and enriching but never aiming to replace the insights that can be gleaned from class analysis.

In using the concept of generations we draw on an ‘undervalued [conceptual] legacy’ for thinking about age and social change (Pilcher 1994). As a sociological concept, social generations has its firmest foundations in Karl Mannheim’s extended essay on The Problem of Generations ([1923] 1952). Mannheim argued that the rhythm of ageing in human affairs is mediated by social structures and that this intersection can be a driver of social change. It is precisely the intersection of subjective experience and social structures that we find valuable in using a social generations approach. This opens up (rather than limits as France and Roberts suggest) the opportunity to analyse young people’s lives in terms of social divisions such as gender, geographic location (including the new inequalities that are emerging on a global scale with the expansion of Asian economies), class and race. Instead of dismissing class analysis (France and Roberts 2015, 222), a generations approach provides a framework for taking a more holistic approach than traditional theorists of class relations have done, to include analysis of the intersections of gender and other social divisions (as we explore in detail in Dwyer and Wyn 2001; Andres and Wyn 2010; Woodman and Wyn 2015).

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This recent concern about the use of the concept of social generation echoes a standard critique of functionalist sociology developed by class scholars in youth studies in the 1970s. The subcultures approach developed by members and affiliates of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham was arguably the most influential strand of youth sociology in the previous century, particularly in the context of theorising class. The disquiet about generations voiced by France and Roberts echoes arguments made by Birmingham School scholars in the 1970s, who were concerned to counter a view of young people in which: ‘[g]eneration defined them … [and] displaced the more traditional category of social class as a more potent index of social position’ (Clarke et al. [1976] 2006, 14). The target of this critique was not directly the sociology of generations in the Mannheimian tradition, but a crude ‘generationalism’ in functionalist claims of an ‘adolescent society’ that emerged in the post-war years (Coleman 1961; see also Musgrove 1964). For the Birmingham subcultural school, these functionalist approaches (that find their own echo in approaches from psychologists like Twenge) had to be challenged as they presented youth as ‘incipiently classless’ (Clarke et al. [1976] 2006, 8).

While this criticism no doubt held for aspects of functionalism, and particularly for psychologically based conceptions of generation (then as now), the sociology of social generations has a different lineage. Although Mannheim does not properly account for material inequality in his essay length piece on generations, the potential for further specifying a class analysis in generational terms is evident, even in this foundational work. A key component of his sociology of generations is the concept of generational units. The modes of action, expression and feeling that mark out a generation are differentiated into distinctive generational units consisting of individuals and groups who draw on the resources available in their generational location in different ways, because they are located differently in respect to other social divisions (Mannheim [1923] 1952, 304). This does not ‘dismiss’ social class or other social divisions.

We note that although this historic debate about the relationship between a social generations approach and class-based analysis appears to be replicated in France and Roberts’ contemporary critique, early in the new century even the lead proponents of the Birmingham School rescinded their earlier dismissal of a significant relationship between generational change and the impacts of capitalism (Woodman and Wyn 2015, 106). The lead protagonists of the subcultures approach eventually came to a similar position to our own, conceding that their efforts to position the study of class reproduction as necessarily being in sharp opposition to theories of generation may have blinkered them to the significance of generational processes visible in the lives of the young people they studied. Three decades after it was first published, in a new introduction to a second edition to Resistance through Rituals, the editors note that a key aspect of youth subcultures that they ‘overlooked’ at the time was that they were ‘generationally specific symbolic systems whose function was also to diffuse generational conflict’ (Hall and Jefferson 2006, xvii).

Hall and Jefferson came to the view that exploring generational processes should not be opposed to the study of class. Yet, the legacy of their earlier resistance to generations remains visible in France and Roberts’ critique.

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Rethinking continuity and change

The challenge of understanding continuity and change in contemporary youth studies is augmented by the visible evidence in young people’s lives that inequalities have been intensified in complex ways. At the same time, using traditional tools for analysing inequalities as founded in the emergence of capitalism risks locking youth scholars into limiting frameworks that deny the intersections of gender with class, and with geographic location and with culture and race. France and Roberts argue that the macro-processes and micro-dynamics evident in the lives of contemporary youth are not ‘“generational effects” but a continuation of a process that emerged with industrial capitalism back in the eighteenth century and involves both social change and the maintenance of the status quo, especially around class and gender relationships’ (France and Roberts 2015, 227). To endorse this means to lose sight of how capitalism itself is being reinvented, through more than class and gender processes, and we gain little traction on the ways in which young people’s lives are shaped by global developments that have a different historic legacy from eighteenth-century Europe.

Hence, while we share many research concerns with France and Roberts, such as foregrounding the contemporary social conditions in which young people shape their lives and in understanding inequalities, we differ in how we conceptualise the relationship between these social inequalities and social change. For example, France and Roberts claim that ‘some existing analyses offer a more thorough understanding of how social change and processes that remain stable, such as class and gender relationships, can impact on the choices and decisions young people make’ (2015, 225, our italics). While different approaches can provide rich and deep accounts of class and gender impact on young lives, a generational lens offers a (reflexive) sociological lens on what ‘stable’ over time means.

While youth research provides evidence of predictability in patterns of outcomes for different groups of young people based on their cultural, social and economic capital, these patterns do not simply unfold over history driven by an inevitable logic. The question of the historical determination of contemporary inequalities for young people is a crucial one that bears elaboration in this discussion. France and Roberts quote selectively from Woodman (2013) to illustrate our ‘dismissal’ of class analysis:

[P]resentation of the predictability of life outcomes for young people based on the standard sociological variables, such as gender and class, can actually limit understandings of inequality. This is particularly the case if this data is presented as crucial evidence against claims of social change. (Woodman 2013, 1.2)

The next two sentences from Woodman (2013) are crucial to interpreting the lines they choose to present and critique:

While most sociologically informed youth research, if not all sociological work by definition, aims to understand young lives in context, too often debates in youth research conflate social change with less stratification, or evidence of continued stratification with evidence against social change. The great promise of youth studies is not so much its ability to trace social change, or highlight patterns of continuity, but to show how the two are intertwined3; Familiar patterns of inequality can emerge in new ways. (Woodman 2013, 1.3)

The point being made here is that class is dynamic, following the kind of analysis of class elaborated by Savage (2000); it is made, and remade in the conditions that face

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contemporary generations. ‘Real world classes are constantly being constructed around us, people are constantly doing class’ (Connell 1983, 148, cited in Ball 2006, 8). The recent work of France (France, Bottrell, and Armstrong 2012; Bottrell and France 2015), and Roberts (2013) suggests that they largely agree, although this synergy is lost in their caricatured version of the sociology of generations.

Far from arguing that focusing on class and gender are distractions from the more important task of understanding social change and its impacts (France and Roberts 2015, 232), we argue that understanding the processes by which class and gender inequalities are emerging is central in a context in which the dynamics of social inequality can take on new twists, potentially making inequalities more stark (even if on the surface things appear to become more equal).

Woodman’s (2012) work on the temporal structures of young lives in the context of changing work patterns provides an example. The analysis investigates the general impact of insecure contracts and variable work patterns in an increasingly 24/7 economy on young people (for example, hospitality work). He includes a discussion of the impact of socio-economic inequality on the patterns identified and the way that social and economic capital can protect people from these impacts. The focus of this work is to provide evidence about how inequalities are inscribed on young people’s lives:

Control over time and the availability of free time have long been identified as resources that are unequally available and inculcated in the reproduction of inequality, for example in the accumulation of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). In this context of increasing variability and, for many people, unpredictability of temporal structures, not individual but primarily collective control over time comes to function in a new way as a resource in the interactive process by which social inequality emerges and is reproduced. (Woodman 2012, 1087)

Woodman’s (2012) analysis shows that the link between control over time and inequality has recently taken on new dimensions with the rise, and in some senses return, of insecure work and a 24/7 economy which can make work patterns less predictable. A sense of the future, and the social and cultural capital resources that can facilitate pursuing such a future, are constructed by young people in relationships with significant others, trust relationships created and maintained by practices that unfold over time. Because engagement with work is highly mediated by the exercise of economic, cultural and social capital, those who cannot control their work time, tend to work unsociable hours. This means they miss out on important events with family and friends, and on opportunities for participation in youth cultural forms, often with little financial recompense (Woodman and Wyn 2015, 140–141).

We see this time-based inequality not as evidence of a process that remains stable, but a dynamic process that is at the least actively maintained and can be significantly reshaped within the context of social change. Our analysis of the temporal structures of young people’s employment has synergies with Bourdieu’s work which refers to the shifts in the structure of employment that accompanied neo-liberalism as ‘a mode of domination of a new kind, based on the creation of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity’ (1998, 85).

Similarly, Andres and Wyn (2010) used a social generations approach (analysing Life Patterns data) to expose how gendered inequalities have emerged amongst the very generation in which equality of education between men and women became something of a reality. This analysis revealed how, despite the expansion of educational opportunities,

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women (of all classes) did not gain the economic returns on their investments in education of their male peers. In this analysis, the use of a generational approach focused on the attitudes and dispositions of the young people, as well as on their trajectories. This meant that the research was able to provide evidence that women did not intentionally seek to have a lesser engagement in workplaces than their male peers. Indeed, a majority were excited by the opportunities that education appeared to provide for them (compared with their mothers’ generation) and held ambitions that were much the same as the young men. The loss of productivity that results from women’s relative disengagement from the labour market has been noted (see Cassells et al. 2012), highlighting the contradictory dynamics of capitalist relations. Although it is possible to see the historic legacy of women’s unequal participation in the workforce, the particular ways in which this plays out in contemporary societies needs to be acknowledged.

Conclusion

The ‘undervalued legacy’ of the sociology of generations is a work in progress that we and other youth researchers are revisiting. Inevitably ambiguities and unanswered questions remain. However, the use of a generational lens can help bring out new insights into the lived experience of class, and the processes behind ‘transmission of disadvantage … through a process of social and material inheritance’ (France and Roberts 2015, 222) as they occur in everyday life and in different parts of the world. As such we see affinities between our own work and at least some studies of classed and gendered young lives, studies that show how such division is actively created in shifting circumstances.

Outside academic youth studies it is possible to find advocates who proclaim that class, gender and race are of little significance (for example, the public intellectuals of the New Right, shock jocks, and many economists and policy-makers in the neoliberal tradition). To caricature a social generations approach in the sociology of youth as advocating the same view is to diminish the opportunities to engage in productive debate about the uses of theories and concepts in youth studies. We share with France and Roberts, and others (Furlong and Cartmel 2007; MacDonald 2011) the view that interrogating questions about change and continuity is a key task for youth researchers. We wish to add however that if the field of youth studies is to be a site where these questions are asked thoroughly and reflexively, it is a mistake to predefine class, or gender and race, as processes that remain stable. Institutional arrangements adjust, politics is played, policies are changed, and people actively draw on unequal resources to maintaining and recreate distinctions and advantages over others in the face of conditions that change over time.

Following from this, we argue that new risks and inequalities do not simply mask old forms of inequality, but are central to the way inequalities, including those of class and gender, are being made afresh in contemporary conditions. To put this rather simplistically, creating a balance sheet that places change in young lives in one column and inequality in the other will not realise the promise of youth studies (Woodman and Wyn 2015). The promise lies instead in tracing the way changes and (continued) inequalities are entwined.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Notes 1. France and Roberts give a sustained, wide-ranging and critical response to our use of

generations, although others have also raised questions about the position we take, including Pollock (2008), Goodwin and O’Connor (2009) and Côté (2014). To minimise confusion among readers, it is useful to note that this critique of our work is from Alan France and Steven Roberts. We also engaged in a separate debate about the concept of generations (although largely on differing issues) with Ken Roberts (2007). Steven Roberts (2010, 2012) has also engaged in a sustained critical engagement with Woodman’s (2009, 2010) writings on individualisation in youth studies.

2. France and Roberts also point to uncertainty and disagreement among those who use the concept of generations about the criteria that mark out a new generation, what is shared in the ‘subjectivity’ of a generation and what is the significance of intergenerational relationships. They also question the criticisms that we (particularly Wyn) have made of the concept of transitions in youth studies. As well as agreeing with France and Roberts that class makes a significant difference to young lives we agree that these are real ambiguities and questions about the concept of generations. We note that if unsettled questions, differing conceptualisations, and fuzziness at the boundaries between categories were disqualifying features for sociological concepts then social research would be left with little to work with. It would, for example, rule out the concept of class. Here we have focus on the crux of their concern about the dangers of our sociology of generation, that it dismisses the significance of class analysis. We engage with the other questions they raise elsewhere, particularly our recent book Youth and Generation: Rethinking Change and Inequality in the Lives of Young People.

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