Generational Transitions in Adulthood

Title All about thirtysomething: generational transitions in adulthood Session Contemporary Adulthood: Theorizing an Uncontested Category Judith Burnett School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies Docklands Campus University of East London University Road East London UK [email protected] All about thirtysomething: generational transitions in adulthood Introduction The need to re-theorise adulthood as a changing constitution and practice has become critical if we are to grasp our biography as social and our personal problems as collective and historical (Mills 1970) and from here produce appropriate sociological responses to our global and individualising world (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). Thus, theorising adulthood requires us to locate adulthood in its historical context, and to recognise it as a historical system in its own right. My own research suggests that we think of adulthood as, in part, a generational experience, since the concept of generation allows us to consider cohorts moving through time and acting upon, and being acted upon, by the historically contingent structures and processes which they encounter, and in turn make. In my own research, I wanted to explore the journey of a particular cohort, that of the second peak of the baby boom in Britain, (born late Fifties and early Sixties) as they hit their thirties. This period saw the rise of an identity and possibly a kind of social group, that of Thirtysomething, which appeared as a mass experience and label primarily in the cultural sphere in the largely developed, urbanised consumer cultures of the Nineties. The basis of this project is that I wanted to grasp something of the social reality behind texts such as Bridget Jones’ Diary and Sex and the City, by finding out more about the social demographic of which such texts spoke. Who is the Thirtysomething Woman? Where did she come from? Where does she go? In sociological terms, we can understand the demographic of Bridget Jones’ Diary as a cohort which emerged primarily in the post-industrial urban areas of the developed world. However, my findings were that actors who may once have been thought of, and/or may even have thought of themselves as ‘Thirtysomething’, form a much larger constituency, cross-class and region, and with multiple identities. I argue that the sociological concept of use to grasp their emergence in social life, (and it is the contention of this thesis that there has been an emergence), is that of generation. Generation as a concept has enabled me to grasp that which class, race, and gender cannot: an age based identity greater than the snap shot of the age today, i.e. an identity and location as it is lived out over time. The concept of generation alone enables us to grasp Thirtysomething as a generational event. It is a marker of age based identity, of a cohort’s specific historical experience, and in this paper, I argue that it is a signal of a transition in adulthood, understood as such by the actors themselves, who picture themselves traversing the lifecourse. This paper examines the concept of ‘thirtysomething’ as understood by focus group participants who gathered to consider their changing life course, and their changing times. The research demonstrates the extent to which the groups were able to see a social dimension to their experience of becoming ‘thirtysomething’ as well as providing some insights into how people perceive adulthood as a time of transition. The concept of Adulthood as the plateau in stasis While transitions into adulthood have been explored in sociology and its cognate disciplines, transitions within adulthood remain undertheorised (Pilcher & Williams, 2003). The general concepts of the Enlightenment have traditionally signalled adulthood as a plateau in life. Following the ferment of youth, adulthood in contrast has been implicitly constructed as a period of stasis. Adulthood was defined by modern science as the time of life when the character is permanently formed and the body is fully grown, when we have reached the limits of potential. Classically, adulthood was not interesting to the psychic trades unless there was a dramatic change, (madness, suicide, criminality, any kind of disability and so on), in which event such changes were constructed as difference, and identified as deviant from the assumed norm of one dimensional stasis. However, one ultimate deviation which attracted social attention was the universal one of ageing, synonymous with ‘growing old’,. which in contrast to the prime of life, was constructed as one of powerlessness, dependency, and even degeneracy (Hockey and James 1993). I suggest that we can imagine this to be a ‘zenith theory’ of the human life course. Implicitly, the lifecourse is drawn in an arc from youth to old age, the molten flow of human child1 becomes set in stone, before its final descent back to the Earth as it cracks and crumbles into biblical dust. This zenith arc draws on the concept of Life found not only in the human sciences, but in the geological, geographical, and botanical. I wish to suggest that adulthood was historically found ‘uninteresting’ in a sociological sense partly for all of the reasons above, but also because class reproduction and class relations were played out across the life course through the social institutions of marriage, family, labour and housing markets, and it was these, and their interrelationship as relations of capitalism which held the interest, not ‘adulthood’ per se. ‘The system’ was conceptualised as the major social system at macro level through which adults live or under which oppression they survive (or not, as the case may be). It was not thought that adulthood might be, itself, the system, or at least one of its integral drivers and dynamics, the closest position being that of the default family unit as a system. 1 A special category of human being, close to a sub-species in popular imaginary The cultural construction of adulthood may now be growing. Certainly, there is evidence that the paradigms of ageing have increased importance in producing social identities, (see for example Hockey & James 2003). Meanwhile, the material relationships of inequalities through ageing have been shown to have acquired a particular significance in the context of global capital flows, leading Vincent (2003) to conclude that ‘pension fund capitalism…appears to me to be a particularly pristine type of capitalism because of the enormous gulf between the apparent owners of ‘capital’ – the beneficiaries – and those who actually control the funds, who in reality are the fund managers,’ (ibid:107), alerting us to the need to recognise that the social relations of age are a powerful organising driver of social stratification as well as subjectivity. In contrast to the ‘plateau in stasis’ view of adulthood, I want to suggest that we instead rescue the agent and see agency at work. While the zenith itself can be more clearly understood as the ideological product, we can also being to consider what, in the absence of jet propulsion, gets a person from A to B, or, more properly, how the system itself can be propelled or constrained, with what effects, on what, with what consequences. From here we can also consider the planes and systems of the lifecourse, which are not atypical, all time and universal but historically contingent and specific to time and place. The life course is an embodied and situated life, through which agency and structure play, and our concepts of adulthood should reflect this. In order to breathe life into adulthood as a space of change and diversity, I now turn to consider the usefulness of otherwise of the conceptual frame of generation. In my own research of people in their thirties, I found the concept of generation used by the actors and by myself in order to make sense of their passage through adulthood, understanding in particular their transitions to have been ‘generational’. Mannheim’s theory of generation Mannheim (1952) argues that generations develop a social life which is above and beyond the biological rhythm of social replacement. At the centre of generational life he argued, lay generational consciousness, which is at once collective, historical and socially aware of its location, i.e. it is a critical consciousness. Mannheim argued that this arose from the difficulties that each new generation would experience as they encountered the ill-fitting traditions and patterns of behaviour of their age. In recognising these issues as social rather than personal issues, cohort agents would work up the materials of their lives to become reflexive, knowing actors acting upon structure with intention. Diversity, expressed through generational units, might occur, with some actors working for the status quo while others sought to change it. However, what precisely a generation can be said to be, is defined in part by what it is not. In particular, a generation must be distinguished from concrete groups such as communities, which can only exist where 'members have concrete knowledge of each other' (ibid), and associational organisations, 'formed for a specific purpose…characterized by a deliberate act of foundation, written statues, and a machinery for dissolving the organization.' (Mannheim 1952:289). In contrast, generations have consciousness and take action, often in an extra-institutional way, often producing its own systems of identification and symbol production, including that which attains, for Mannheim, social knowledge, or at least in our terms today, what we can think of as social understandings. This emphasis on consciousness and action is a major point of contrast with the classical view of cohorts as set out by Ryder (1965; 1985), who takes the view that 'The new cohorts provide the opportunity for social change to occur. They do not cause change; they permit it,' (1985:11).

Load more