So young adulthood should be a gradual transition into—what? There are several words that come to mind when the word ‘adult ’ is spoken, rather than just looking it up in a dictionary. There’s responsibility, obligations, duty for example that are implied in ‘well, you’re an adult now so…?’ For many people these suggest work, career, families, self-fulfilment, self-actualisation and these roles and futures should be available to the young person. But as we know in many parts of the world, they are not there. They are certainly not there in large swathes of the world in the 2nd decade of the twenty-first century, which have been ruined by drought or wars or famine. In the UK at the time of writing we are offering many young people the prospect of never being able to buy their own home and at best a job that is part of the so-called gig economy where you try and make ends meet doing part time jobs as and when they come up. And if you do set up home and want to start a family then it’s more than likely that both of you will have to work and any children you have will have will need looking after and also educated from a young age to get a head start in life which you know is necessary from your own experience to have. Adulthood for many young adults may appear to be just round the corner but it never seems to arrive. We have instead what’s called ‘leaving the nest’ or rather not doing so. This delayed departure could be a consequence of various factors such marriage being less easy with little money to buy a home , or that finding a partner is that harder at home after graduation from university or finding that the jobs for graduates are not that common for someone with a degree in sociology or media studies. Delaying your departure is on the increase in the UK. In 1996, 2.7 million young adults aged 20–34 were living with their parents at home . In 2016, the figure had risen to 3.3 million (Office for National Statistics, 2016).
Some young adults form relationships, plan their careers, have families, display self-regulation , have active leisure pursuits and generally carve out a life for themselves and maybe taste success in their own terms. 5 Stereotypes exist nevertheless and some are not that attractive. ‘Thirty-somethings ’ is an expression that is often used disparagingly by those who are not thirty-something as those who are celebrate noisily and confidently their new found status in a new family in such ecologies as restaurants, parks and taking-the-kids-to-school. Their successes and failures in life are the stuff of TV series and novels where characters live in cities, small towns and people work in offices, teaching, doing business and so on.
Life Course Theory
Studies of the life course are often the prerogative of sociologists and, as a developmental psychologist with an interest in consumer research 6 I am hesitant about plunging into an area where I am not comfortable enough to take the responsibility of giving you what I have digested and understood of the literature so I have interpreted what I have read in my own words. Elder (1998, 2003) provides a basic introduction. So the life course is a theoretical orientation that provides a frame for defining lines of enquiry and what makes it different from say the psychology of development from infancy to old age is the evidence base and the argument that is used. History and social institutions predominate in this framing or orientation over the period of the lifespan. For example ‘teenagers’ could be discussed in terms of the construction of the concept and the reasons for it in terms of the history of the child/adult threshold and perhaps these liminal 7 considerations could be applied to other social constructions of age-related categories. Maybe the onset of ‘old age’ is delayed as the media construct that change with such expressions as ‘60 is the new 40’. 8 In any case, the fact that boundaries exist and change and that can be explained by appealing to historical and other macro-level changes seems to be an example of a life course approach.
But first let’s introduce some concepts. There are three that are used frequently: Age, period and cohort . Age is obvious as it’s used in both sociology and psychology and it refers to chronological age. As you grow up, changes in your physiology and behaviour can be attributed to you growing older.
A period refers to environmental, economic, and social factors such as war, famine or changes in the economy. This seems to me one of the more difficult and slippery concepts to use. With the benefit of hindsight we can attribute a time in the twentieth century for example when these factors were strong enough to define a period . Or can we? As much of our popular imagination is moulded by the media it is difficult for example to analyse the expression ‘the swinging sixties’ as a well-defined period in British history as it differs depending on what part of Britain you lived in and what socio-economic class you were.
A cohort is a group of people who were born at roughly the same period in a particular culture and share similar culturally mediated histories as they grow up. The breaking down of the Berlin Wall for example if experienced by a cohort of people who were at University at that time would possess that history and possibly have similar experiences whereas a child or older adult might recall the event differently if at all. Members of a cohort have experienced the same historic events and cultural milieu.
Generation Theory
In this section I’ll explore what is known as generation theory . This is when people talk of groups of people as similar because they were born in a certain period—‘children of the Sixties’ that sort of thing. We’ll start with the first group, the boomers .
Boomers
These were one of the earliest group to be identified and they are often known as the ‘baby boomers ’ but most of them are older men and women now so the single word epithet will do nicely. The boomer generation had a demographic existence because it refers to the generation who were born after World War II and the defeat of Nazism. An increase in births was recorded after the war and this was not unique to the USA but included Europe as well (including the UK). The reasons are not hard to fathom—new opportunities, political change and war veterans returning to their families created optimism and a desire to start anew. This demographic surge would create a wave that washed over the rest of the century and even now is being felt with the boomers reaching an age when social services for older people are needed and budgets both state and private are being stretched on a national scale. Problems in defining who the boomers are also blur the boundaries of this group. As a demographic the onset is clear, just after the 2nd World War when veterans, the fathers of the boomers , returned post war—say 1946. But when do we define the zone of birth to qualify as a ‘boomer’? Some say the latest year should be 1954 and others claim 1964. If you were born in 1946 you’re a boomer now (2018) aged 72. But you’re only 54 if you were born in 1964. The point is, can you assume that this cohort aged between 54 and 72 years, of mainly active older people consuming services both provided by the state like health and social care as well as having disposal income from private pensions paying out a proportion of final income earned, constitute a coherent group of people? Some are the children of the 60s and the youth of the 70s while others grew up through childhood and adolescence in the 70s and the cultural milieu was very different during these decades.
So there are several problems when taking a generational approach to analysing groups or cohorts of people. One consists of the assumptions that need to be made to claim that the boomers for example have similarities. Do they all have the same aspirations, needs, and values ? Is this analysis appropriate for boomers who did not grow up and live in the USA? I cannot see for example how a Chinese person experiencing as a child the era of Mao and the famines, surviving the cultural revolution and living through the one-child policy (which certainly had a demographic influence) is in any way comparable to youngsters living in 50s and 60s America although I can see these external societal factors having an influence on a cohort of older Chinese people as they start to explore as twenty-first century tourists the world outside the Middle Kingdom.
My main criticism of any approach which puts people together as a cohort based on their birth era, is that it doesn’t make psychological sense even at the l
evel of one culture far less across all cultures. Psychologists assume people have values, sure but these are sourced and established from many different places and people, parents, close intimates, role models in media and at school, as well as civic and religious leaders with their morals and standards. These feed, over the years into a developing individual who is mentally constructing a world-view and a set of values that is changing as she grows up and meets many different people whose views and visions are influential both negatively with rejection and positively with acceptance. Surely this model does justice to the complexity of individuals? I’ll return to further criticism and comment later but we need to look at some more generation cohorts.
Generation X
This was the title of a novel written by Douglas Coupland and published in 1991. The novel was called Generation X : Tales for an accelerated culture and it was a tale of ‘twenty-something’ angst in the contemporary world at that time. In terms of sales it was a slow-burner but it took off and the generation name stuck as a label for the condition of a generation doomed to dead-end jobs in a world dominated by consumerism and status. They were found in North America at that time. At least that’s my brief take on the novel and whether it possesses any sociological reality of a particular place at a certain time in the late twentieth century, I’ll leave other readers to decide on that. However it did fill a gap and give a name to the generation following the boomers but the same criticisms that I raised about the boomers will apply here, without even the saving grace of a demographic surge to provide at least a semblance of objectivity. The extent to which ‘Generation X ’ has passed into common parlance should not be underestimated either and it’s common parlance for a generation living a fairly wild life but having a job too (Barnett, 2017). Summarised as work hard but play hard.
Millennials
This group looks much more promising as a viable sector that could be both different from other consumers and consequently there would be consumer-related implications and also the difference should be theoretically underwritten by both psychological insights and consumer research. Sometimes known as Generation Y (because Y follows X), millennials are well-represented in the business literature together with associated attempts at definitions. So Hayward (2016) says they are those born between 1980 and 1994 …or 1995 or even 2000 (op. cit., p. 10). The looseness becomes clearer when we realise that time is passing and the characteristics of these people are that they are ‘digital natives’ so some of my students will be millennials now in 2018. We’ll have to change the entry date or invent a new category! 9 However the ‘digital native ’ appellation gives us a new focus to hold the definition together. Being familiar with digital media since you were a young child when mum always held a black thing in front of her and was looking at it and playing with it or talking to an invisible person and never to me would be one of the first introductions to the smartphone before your older sister showed you how to use it and maybe when the latest iPhone came out you got her older one. 10 Prolonged use of social media has all sorts of consequences concerning friendship patterns and definition and use of friends, to take just one example of the different and key roles media plays in millennial life. In the future access to the internet will be seen as a necessary part of public services like clean water from a tap or energy 11 at a switch. Access to this will be anyplace, anytime using smartphone technology. 12
Postscript
When I was researching this section of the book I discovered a classic paper on generational analysis by Allan Buss (Buss , 1974), an author I admired and respected. The use of the original term ‘generation’ refers to a various cohorts of people of the same age. Buss was trying to see, as the generation advanced across the years with each individual changing due to heredity and environment how we can simultaneously take all these into account. I concluded that it was of theoretical interest only and would not be relevant for consumer researchers interested in exploring the three generational categories that I described here. But the complexity of what was happening led me to look at how other writers had tackled ‘generations’ and I found that it meant different things and could be used in different ways (Kertzer , 1983). One that is cited called a cohort effect seems to fit the bill well as covering how millennials, generation X , and boomers are similar. Kertzer argued that within each of these groups there were experiences throughout life that could be viewed as part of the historical period when they lived (op. cit., p. 128).
Although the terms Boomers , Generation X , and Millennials should be simple categories that inform us whether we can generalise about people we’ve defined or whether a more psychographic 13 way of segmenting audiences or consumers is to be preferred, there is another way they have been used. They have been used as historical constructs in a prescriptive fashion to predict future trends. There was one book that was referred to when generations came up in my search. It was by two writers called William Strauss and Neil Howe and was called Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 and it goes well beyond this limited remit outline by the cohort effect (as you can see from the title). Briefly, the argument is that the history of America can be analysed as a life course from childhood through old age. The term ‘generation’ then applies to these discrete birth year groups (Strauss & Howe, p. 8). Eighteen generations have been identified from the first New World colonists through to the present millennials. Each of these is given a peer personality and I find that mine is BOOMER i.e. rising adult , born 1943–1960, aged 30–47 (remember this was written in 1991). I don’t recognise myself in the page on BOOMERS but then I was not born in the USA. My own opinion is that using the past to predict the future might work, sometimes, at the level of individual human behaviour which is useful if you wish to avoid criminals and other undesirables but historical change is so dependent on what is recorded and recognised as ‘important’ when you are poring over and scrutinising the historical record that a scholar who is shall we say a little evangelical about his own historiography 14 is bound to be selective. The reviews of Generations… and the other books in the same vein by Strauss and Howe were not very positive and could be positively scathing (Lind , 1997).
In conclusion, despite the limited power of a description of cohort as born in a particular time band 15 in one culture and consequently experiencing similar environments as they grow up, get older and die, we can still salvage something from this. The experience of people since the advent of readily available digital communication with instant interrogation of the internet, is different from the experience of those of us who grew up before all that. Maybe we do think, feel, socially interact differently and can’t catch up because we missed out. However there is a tendency to dramatise, develop, highlight and extract more than is actually there if we use and adapt these ideas to suit our interests. So when marketers are told of the existence of a new group called the millennials then there is a temptation to look for subgroups and ascribe qualities to them that might not have been in the original definition. One of the most salient things that were said by Kahneman was that the human mind had great difficulty in understanding the idea of randomness and there was a tendency to look for cause and effect to make sense of our world. In other words we tend to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate how important pure chance is in events.
Notes
1.The preferred description of this age group: see NPR (2016).
2.In the UK 65 was the retirement age for men who for much of the twentieth century were the main breadwinners in the family. Women retired at 60 and both men and women were eligible for a state pension at 65 and 60 respectively. Now there is no ‘retirement age’ from work as it’s seen as discriminatory.
3.A list of ‘things to do before I die’. See White (2017).
4. Education can be split into three parts: Primary is from 5 years (in the UK) until 11/12 followed by secondary and these two are compulsory. Tertiary is academic and optional and is pursued after that.<
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5.Let it not be thought that this rather normative list exhausts or monopolises the wide range of life styles that constitute a happy, successful life or neglect those people where things do not work out.
6.Or a consumer researcher with more than a passing interest in developmental psychology.
7.Liminal in sociology or social anthropology means boundaries so one liminal consideration would be how the transition from child to teen or teen to adult is marked.
8.A quick Google also cites ‘80 is the new 60’ and I’m sure there are more variations on that theme.
9.Not a joke—already we read about Generation Z on Wikipedia.
10.The tradition of hand-me-downs is known I’m sure to many readers. I guess this is an update.
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