Generational Theory

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Definition of ‘Generation

CARLOS A. MALLMANN and GUILLERMO A. LEMARCHAND:

  • "Pitirim A. Sorokin: A ‘‘generation’’ is that part of the person’s life where the individual is

an active member of the society and it can be considered as the natural unit of time when the socio-cultural dynamics generates its own social rhythms.

  • Ottokar Lorenz: The duration of active life of men, from the moment of their social emergence to that of retirement or death.
  • Karl Mannheim: Defined the concept of ‘‘generation unit’’ as a group of close cohorts touched

by an important and specific historical event during their formative ages in order to avoid confusion with the traditional demographic notion of Generation.”

(https://www.academia.edu/13103863/Generational_Explanation_of_Long_Term_Billow_Like_Dynamics_of_Societal_Processes)

History

Amanda van Eck Duymaer van Twist and Suzanne Newcombe:

"Despite some preceding work on the topic, Strauss and Howe are credited with having popularised the generational theory in the 1990s. However, theories about cohorts of generations have wide cultural resonance in the twentieth century.

Perhaps the origin of generational theory belongs to Karl Mannheim, in his 1923 essay, ‘The Problem of Generations.’ Mannheim explained that a generation is a social location that has the potential to affect an individual’s consciousness in much the same way as social class or culture does. He argued that generations are especially affected by major historical events. Mannheim, however, did not recognise cycles. Mannheim’s theory of generations focuses on the influence of history and social events, which in turn influence generations, who change in response to their social surrounding. Mannheim’s theory can be summarised by the idea that people resemble their times more than they resemble their parents (McCrindle, 2007)

Sociologist Norman Ryder (1965) also focused on cohorts seen as aggregates of individuals who could be viewed as independent variables in social change. However, he also specified that cohorts should be placed within other population parameters, such as geographical location, education, and race. Again, this is something Strauss and Howe do not discuss in detail. A criticism of their work is that it does not adequately consider differences in race, socio-economic class, or other social markers.

Another influence was Morris Massey, who identified the so-called Baby Boomers as the generation born immediately after WWII. A sociologist, Massey argued that our behaviours are driven by our value system and generational groups are likely to share value systems. Therefore, people within a generation are more likely to share what Massey called ‘value programming,’ and consequently ‘value systems.’ In contrast, different generation cohorts are more likely to be at odds as they have different ‘value programming.’ In short, Massey argued that values can be generalised based on generations.

Strauss and Howe credit Arthur Scheslinger Jr, an academic historian at Harvard and the City University of New York, as pioneering the cycle approach to American history. Scheslinger’s work on generational cycles appeared in essays before appearing in The Cycles of American History (1986). Strauss and Howe also make use of the generational theories developed by José Ortega Y Gasset and Julián Marías, Spanish philosophers who wrote on history as a system and Anthony Esler’s The Human Venture (2004).

Generational theories are more widely discussed in sociology and history. However, these ideas do not have the same kind of millenarian overtones as Strauss and Howe’s theories. In the European context, Pierre Bourdieu, Julius Peterson, and Willhelm Pinder have also been influential."

(https://www.cdamm.org/articles/strauss-howe)

Typology

Distinguishing Family-Based Generations from Social Historical Generations

CARLOS A. MALLMANN and GUILLERMO A. LEMARCHAND:

“We agree with Mannheim’s assertion that one has to avoid the confusion with the traditional demographic concept of generation. This notion is based on the obvious differentiation between the two generations which coexist in a family, which we call Family Biological Generations (FBG).

Marchetti, among many others, has shown that the time difference between them is of the order of 25 11 years. This statement means that 50% of the children generated in a cohort of women are delivered between their ages of 14 and 36 years.

On the other hand, these recently born children still have — as we show later — to be nurtured up to their adulthood which means another 16.8 1 years. In this way, the children of this cohort group are inserted in social life when their mothers are 30 to 54 years old. We define this period of time as Family Social Generation (FSG). The FBG and the FSG have very clear conceptualizations within families. This is not the case with respect to the society in which they live, because in it a continuous set of cohorts of women coexist, which means, as we said previously, that the flow of new adults is continuous, not discontinuous as in families.

When we study the case of societies we need to introduce a different concept of generation, namely: the Societal Historical Generation (SHG).

We believe that this lapse is equal to the average life-lapse in which, according to human being’s psycho-somatic epigenetic development ground plan, their motivational priority is social and habital, namely between 16 and 56 years of age. In the next section we provide a brief description of the research results on which this affirmation is based. Sorokin and Lorenz, among others, made a similar, but not identical, statement when they said that its duration is equal to the time-span in which persons are active as members of asociety, from themomentof their socialemergence to thatof retirement or death. Mentre’s conception was very close to ours. He coined the term ‘‘Social Generations’’ in a book by that name in 1920, for him a generation is ‘‘a state of collective mind in a human group that endures for a certain time’’.

The discontinuity needed in order to distinguish SHG from the continuum of them existing in societies is provided initially as a consequence of the self-organizing process, which manifestation is a social entelechy that is a function of time.

From the analysis of historical processes we concluded that the sequence of Societal Historical Generations of a society is conformed by strings of billows which are in phase among them, each followed by another string which has a different phase.

The phase changes from one string to the next is determined by societal-transcendental historical events as, in one way or another, Mannheim, Ortega y Gasset, Ayala, and Marıas, among others posited.

History shows that these recurrences propagate within the society maintaining their timing, even in the periods of internal transcendental events such as socio-political revolutions.”

(https://www.academia.edu/13103863/Generational_Explanation_of_Long_Term_Billow_Like_Dynamics_of_Societal_Processes)


Four Motivational Concern Waves and Their Characteristics

CARLOS A. MALLMANN and GUILLERMO A. LEMARCHAND:

“It is interesting to note that the idea of the existence of a four-phase rhythm (childhood, youth, maturity, old age) for societies and human beings was pointed out many times from the Roman historian Florus (approximately 200 AD) to Strauss and Howe. Table 3 shows a list of some examples. In order to recognize that these different authors realized the existence of these four stages and that the characteristics of each stage are very similar, we checked the definition of each author in their original works.


We have named them as:

1. Relating and organizing according to the societal identity formulation reached in the previous period;

2. Acting and achieving with the established relations and organizations;

3. Questioning and understanding the previous actions and achievements; and

4. Reformulating the societal identity according to the previous experience.


It is worthwhile to mention that these categories are the same ones encountered, in the recurrences of individual human beings.”

(https://www.academia.edu/13103863/Generational_Explanation_of_Long_Term_Billow_Like_Dynamics_of_Societal_Processes)

More information


Bibliography

Mannheim, Karl. 1952. “The Problem of Generations” In Kecskemeti, Paul (ed.) Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge: Collected Works, Volume 5. New York: Routledge: 276–322.

Ortega y Gasset, José. 1981. History as a System. : And Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History. Greenwood Press.

Ryder, Norman. 1965. “The cohort as a concept in the study of social change,” American Sociological Review, 30 (6): 843–861.

Scheslinger, Arthur. 1986. The Cycles of American History. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.