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). Cohorts, made by researchers, live through the social situation which they encounter. Generations, made by actors, are the grit in the machine, prone to mobilisation, somnolence, deviance, rigid conformity, from which actions, they change the social situation even as they live it. Generations, then, act upon the system and are in turn acted upon. Indeed, generations are the system, and it is their various location in time and space which both joins all living cohorts at the hip and simultaneously can differently locate them. Thus generations may play games of positional strategy and advantage in coalitions and conflicting systems, which shift and change from setting to setting.

Defining the generational cluster

In researching the sociology of generations, I made a small case study of

‘Thirtysomething’. My sample consisted of those who were in their thirties at the time of doing the research, (2001), and thus may/not be said to have been

Thirtysomething at that point in their lifecourse. This group can be broadly defined by its birth dates as the second peak of the boomer population in Britain, and the focus groups contained these plus those who came to settle in Britain during the cohort’s life time.

Figure 1.1 shows the volume of births in England and Wales 1901-2000. The British baby boom can be seen to start at the close of the Second World War, and to have two peaks, a first, sharp peak between 1950-1955, and a second, broader curve between 1960-1970. This research was concerned largely with the second peak, who had moved into their thirties at the time in which I conducted the empirical study in 2000, with its upper end just approaching forty. Figure 1.1 Births: England and Wales, 1901-2000

Births, England and Wales, 1901-2000

1,000,000 800,000

600,000 average 400,000 number of 200,000 births in 5 year periods 0

1901-19051911-19151921-19251931-19351941-19451951-19551961-19651971-19751981-19851991-1995

Source: Office of National Statistics, dataset PBH11 (www.statistics.gov.uk)

Locating the generational cluster: The disorganisation of Britain The generation encountered social relations at a very specific historical configuration, of boom-bust-boom within the context of the transitions of the European region, and the Cold War. The generation grew up at a time of mass production and of a general increase in affluence across Europe, yet made its youth transitions in a period of economic and political crisis. The British response was to move from a state-civil society model marked by political consensus in the centre ground to a state-market model, characterised by uncontained social conflict, a breakdown of corporatism, and a disorganisation of the relations of production (Lash & Urry 1987). This was a highly differentiated process, reflecting the regional patterns of industrialism in Britain, and the space of flows such as capital flows manifested in the private housing and more general property markets. My focus group data revealed that actors had become aware of this, and understood their identities in regionalised ways. Secondly, this process of the restructuring of capital in particular spatialised ways was a gendered process, pulling women out of the home (Beck 1992) and into the service sector, education and further training. The generation has been part of the restructuring of inter-generational relationships as a result of this and other social dynamics including the changing position of women and their changed location and relationships to social institutions (Irwin 1999). An important component of the opportunity structure for women was that claimed to be the second demographic transition (Lesthaeghe 1995), reflexive modernisation (Beck 1992) and the loss of previously closely observed traditions (Giddens 1991), which has brought some freedom (albeit with constraints). An important constraint was found to be that of the welfare state. The transition attempted during the Eighties can be thought as peculiar to the British model of liberal inconsistency. The decline of civil society combined with the continued privacy rules of ‘family life’ (which places it beyond the scope of the intervention of the liberal state), occurred at a time of increased and changed patterns of globalisation. Whereas the globalisation process erodes all systems of nation state, including that argued by Bob Deacon (1997) to be the welfare regime, it seems that it eroded some of its processes rather more than others, with differential impact on differently located groups. This has in practice constituted a considerable constraint on women, (Lewis 1993). The sexual division of labour while shaken, has not disappeared. The cost of family dissolution and caring still mainly falls upon women’s shoulders (Ruspini & Dale 2002). Even so, whereas the masculinities of the industrial world have come to be eroded, the femininities have perhaps benefited to some extent. Ruspini (2002) comments that the social change involves a) the de-institutionalisation of the life course and a related welfare problem (since welfare was/is based upon a male breadwinner model), b) carries impacts for individuals and families for example through family recombination, c) and raises moral issues for example, over the division of labour. In summary, ‘...patterns of life and expectations have changed more fundamentally than those of men, but in contradictory and ambivalent ways,’ (2002:18). Generational responses to the disorganisation Generational activity in the classical Mannheimian sense appears to have been gendered, and occurs at different points in the lifecourse. While women participated in much of the cultural and political life at a younger age, the recorded history of the time indicates a manifestation which was in part constituted through shifts in the position of, and the opening up of, the identities of men. Additionally, an important note is the ephemeral nature of many generational identities in Britain during the Eighties (from the Yuppies and the Essex Girls, to those produced through musical and political currents), and these speak of the considerable flux of British social relations during the period. While such generational categories may be considered a form of generational unit, they were short lived and the generation did not capture control of social resources. I concluded that the generation was unable to muster a coherent intellectual or material force in the Eighties, beyond cultural groupings around music and popular culture and critical movements, which were linked. This observation applies for example to sexual cultures, and material power struggles around matters such as the British government’s policy towards HIV positive communities and the place of sex education in schools . In any event, the second peak of the baby boom were unable to form a strategic generation in its youthful moment, unlike the Sixties movements argued by Edmunds and Turner (2002) to have done precisely that. Unlike movements sustained across more than one generation, or generations which are fully institutionalised and thus register within the system, we can say that the second peak of the baby boom in Britain is rather characterised by its partial institutionalisation, and its ephemeral cultural life. Thus the nature of its transitions in early adulthood impacted its capacity to muster as a generational force. The second phase of generational activity can be said to have been played out in part through the ‘Thirtysomething’ phenomenon, and this is notable for having been publicly constructed as a female phenomenon. This may yet be a transient name, or a name which becomes universal and thus loses its historical specificity2. By locating the generation I have found that the kind of historical events which have produced 'Thirtysomething' are found in the invisible world of women's lives as much as pop culture or experiences of war. It has been the long change through institutions, education, work, and liberalised family codes which have ultimately produced some of the ‘right’ conditions for Thirtysomething to manifest3. Agency, however, has played upon these conditions, in order to produce a temporary identity and material location, that of being Thirtysomething.

3 I recall Miller’s idea that ‘Being more lasting, a true historical trend by its nature will have more sociological significance than temporary, though significant, historical events,’ (Miller 2000:36). Thus, generation theory is challenged to rethink its definition of history as big event, traumatic, and public, and I note that generation theory suffers from its over masculinist emphasis. In this sense, Thirtysomething as a phenomenon can be seen as in part located in the social relations of a cohort. Its agency suggests that it is better conceptualised as a generational event, rather than merely a cohort event. Its potential difference to subsequent cohorts also suggest such a generational marker: 1 Even in the time in which I have carried out this research, the discourse of Thirtysomething has become decontextualised from its historical meaning and has,arguably, begun to slip from view, since I note that the next cohort of women entering their thirties may or may not refer to themselves as Thirtysomething, and when they do, Thirtysomething may be constructed slightly or even majorly, differently.

Subjective experiences of Thirtysomething & transitions in adulthood For ease of simplicity in presenting these findings only, and not to be taken as reflecting the complexity of subjective experience, I am going to look at two aspects of the focus group data: 1. The general concept of Thirtysomething as a ‘new’ phase of adulthood 2. The general concept that Thirtysomething is ‘generational’ and the actors capacity to identify with their cohort The general concept of Thirtysomething as a ‘new’ phase of adulthood I asked one group what they would expect to find in a book called 'Thirtysomething' if they came across it in a bookshop, which drew this response:

I was just thinking that I would check when it was written, because obviously if it was written ten years ago, I would probably feel that it wasn't necessarily relevant to me because it would usually be about Thirtysomethings then, so I don't know if it is something that dates quite quickly. …it wouldn't be specific enough. (B564) This raises the issue of the meanings of the mass nature of the experience of this category, and the awareness of its fore-runners, as for example found in the prototype found in the first wave of the boomer generation had moved through the system (Heide 1995). The actor had assumed that the embryonic category of Thirtysomething had changed and that her own experience of ‘being thirtysomething’ was somehow different. This raises the issue of ‘feeling uniqueness’, and the sense of being in the throes of a new wave of social and personal experience. This social feeling is a classic indicator of generationalism (Wohl, 1980). Thirtysomething horizons: the fronts of life

The Thirtysomething terrain was rich with potentials featuring a configuration of choices and necessity, opportunities and constraint. Its potentials lead me to frame it as Ricoeur’s (1998) horizon of expectation. As such, it constitutes a plane which has not got infinite and general possibilities, but specific possibilities

In Gidden’s terms the reflexive project of the self becomes a site of biographical work: ‘The more tradition loses its hold, and the more daily life is reconfigured in terms of the dialectical interplay of the local and the global, the more individuals are forced to negotiate lifestyle choices among a diversity of options,’ (1991:5). For Beck, this active and self-directed society is argued to be the result of individualised, reflexive modernisation: ‘In the individualised society, the individual must…learn, on pain of permanent disadvantage, to conceive of himself or herself as the centre of action, as the planning office with respect to his/her own biography, abilities, orientations, relationships, and so on,’ (1992:135). Individuals thus take responsibility for their individual lives. This sets up certain problems, such as what to do? When to do it? Life in the thirties was understood to present an extra level of difficulty and complexity than for example, the same dilemmas encountered during the teens and twenties. This made ‘thirtysomething’ special, not least because the configuration of opportunities and constraints were not as their mother’s generations had found it: .

A I think Thirtysomething for our generation is the huge amount of choice about virtually everything in life…to have kids, to not have kids, to have a career, to not have a career, to get married, not get married.. B As long as you're educated. So long as you're educated, you have choice. (T665-668) Reasons for its specialness is that past lifecourse begins to accumulate, but actors are only so far along their lifecourse and therefore have other possibilities . : Thirtysomething places the actor in relation to settlement and the (un)fixing of relationships. A major theme presented to me was that Thirtysomething is a conduit for bringing to the actor and/or releasing the actor from responsibilities. Thirtysomething as a life phase could be and frequently was contrasted to youth. While actors felt themselves to be possibly youthful, they distinguished themselves from being young per se, by the increased complexity of running the central planning office of their biography and their experiences of, and their attitudes towards, (ir)responsibilities.

For those who started their families in their late twenties or thirties, the perception of youth conforms with a more middle class model associated with a lack of responsibilities Others in their thirties and early forties, especially if they have had family responsibilities earlier, found Thirtysomething a time of shedding responsibilities, extrication from exhausted relationships, and the opening up of new opportunities. For these two actors, the first of whom grew up in the Seventies and whose parents divorced, and the second of whom had started a family at twenty years old, youthfulness is associated with lack of responsibilities and thus Thirtysomething represents a new lease of (youthful) life: I mean, with my dad leaving home I used to have to work, and keep the house while my mum worked...so I didn't do much…so it's like only been in the last years that I've started doing things…I feel younger now than I did at twenty one. (R971-980) It was in these ways, that irrespective of which path take previously, (e.g. to have started a family or not to have started a family), individuals found themselves in social situations which presented dilemmas, (e.g. ‘should I start a family now?’ Versus ‘What should I do now that my family is growing/grown up?’) and choices which allowed actors to see similarity in one another. This was common to many of the fronts of life, which meant that focus groups, while composed of individuals with different circumstances, could still arrive at a group sense of sharing a commonality, the label for which ‘Thirtysomething’ provided a means of discourse. I noted with great interest that the women actors in the focus groups located themselves in series or generational chains of women, rather than male generations, and evoked the concept of generation in order to talk about themselves:

I think it's much harder for our generation of women to find work because we don't have the same support structures. We don't have family living nearby necessarily, and probably our partners are having to work much longer hours and it's much more difficult to juggle career and family I think. (B472) The general concept that Thirtysomething is ‘generational’ and the actors capacity to identify with their cohort This latter category rested in part on the actors’ memoryware4, a form of memory and archiving in which the groups identified what they felt to have been. This comes close to Mannheim’s (1952) concept of generational consciousness. Actors achieved high degrees of consensus in their memory work, about what was significant about ‘the past’ and the reasons for its significance.

• The scene of ‘growing young’ in boom, bust, boom

What was remembered of growing up? In the Time lines data, there are numerous references to this increased affluence as it was experienced in Britain, for example in the recording of objects, and experiences remembered by material objects, fashion, childhood consumption, the media etc. I found that the promotion of youth culture by big industry was an important factor in the actors lived experiences and their carving out identities, and noted the reinvention of youth culture to apply to a much larger audience of consumers, youth programming initially applied to teenagers, but in the Eighties was increased to up to thirty years old, and at the turn of the nineties was re-expanded further to include up to thirtyfive and aspirational post thirty-fives. When considered as a cumulative whole, what we have here is that the generation

has been targeted as ‘young, youth, and youthful’, since the age of 12. By the

time I met them as focus groups this amounts to the best part of twenty-five to

thirty years, certainly the whole of their adult lives. In thinking about structures of

remembering and forgetting, I note that this generation have never been allowed

to forget being young, youth, or youthful! In this sense, the generation did not grow

old but young through boom-bust-boom Britain.

• The scene of 'Thatcherism' in particular, and a politicalscape in general

What was remembered of the youth transition?

4 o strikes, and in particular power cuts and the three day week o shortages, e.g. sugar, potato o signs of modernisation: Spaghetti Junction, Concorde, Inter-city trains o unemployment and economic scarcity for the family and friends as well as the

actor(s)

This was experienced as particularly geographical with regional difference becoming known as the 'North-South' divide. Memory is marked by the polarisation of British society during this period. • the scene of 'working out the problem of going to work'.

For some reason, the transition to work was earmarked by the actors in focus

groups as of major significance, as a kind of transition. This was referred to much

more than of other transitions for example into relationships, marriages, having

children and so on, when actors discussed memory (not the present).

The argument of social theory such as found in Beck (1992) and Giddens (1991) (1994), is that the identity of ‘we’ becomes an identity of ‘me’ under changing social conditions which leads to an internalisation of the social as a privatised ‘me/my’ problem. Yet the focus group data suggests awareness of the cohort and a form of generational consciousness which Mannheim may have recognised, were he to abandon the implicitly public view of generational activity to which he clung.

Conclusion:Thirtysomething: Implications for Theorising Adulthood

What can we say about thirtysomething? The cohort came of age at a very particular conjuncture in Britain (in Europe), at a time of the reformation of the relationship between state and market, public and personal. Women were caught up in this in specifically located ways, and the generation as a whole formed identification systems when young which reflected this. However, the cohort couldn’t achieve or hold on to the cultural space or positional power that, for example, parts of the Sixties population did. Thirtysomething was found to bear consciousness which was presented by the actors as connected to the past, and framed as past experience. This was the lived experience of these social transformations, and areas of consensus had developed around the meaning of past changes, and I suggest, social judgements had been formed. Memory was organised in very specific ways, (only certain things were remembered, and only in certain ways), and I suggest that we can think of this kind of generational memory as a particular kind of memory act, which provides important social materials of knowledge and identity which are surprisingly long lasting. Such ‘memoryware’ can be constituted as a virtual archive, representing a material and social universe which maintains aspects into the present, and represents a normative community of kinds. The focus group data revealed that adults perceive transitions within adulthood. Transitions are not thought to cease at age 21, or upon marriage. The focus group actors were also clear that the transitions which they experienced in the past, and their situation in the present, were specific and historical. They exhibited signs of generationalism (Wohl 1980), such as feelings of uniqueness as a cohort and a sense of cohort belonging and awareness, although we could not say that their generational identification was as strong as for some it may have been in youth. Women actors looked back at imaginary chains of women generations, and the sequencing in time was different to the few male actors in the groups. Thirtysomething had become established as a particular conjuncture in the lifecourse. Some of its qualities can be found by looking at the social contexts, for example, in considering why these actors may think of themselves as ‘youthful but not quite middle aged’; their attachment to the problematic of, and discourse about, ‘choices’; their disillusionment with political and other formal social institutions, including financial, legal, medical and so on. Defining qualities included the perception of life as a series of fronts of action. Each front required almost constant action in order to maintain or to progress it. Such action might produce contradictory results: what is a good action on one front might have a negative effect on another. Actors struggled with their embodiment, their inability to be in two places at once and experienced choices as moral dilemmas: which front should they choose to act upon? What ranking and system of hierarchy were to be invoked in making such ‘choices’? I found the perception of time to be quite linear, and modernist. Their lifecourses stretched out before the actors. The ‘further away’ they placed themselves in their imagination, for example to old age, the vaguer they became about what it might be like, or what it might mean to them. Life was perceived as less segmented than they assumed to have been the case in the past, but still, nonetheless, was rather more scripted than much of our theorising might currently allow. Thirtysomething was a particular kind of time in the lifecourse, the beat of the lifecourse clock counted out time which was shortening along some fronts of action, family life was one, ‘making it’ in a career was another. ‘Thirtysomething’ for some actors was a release from a less than satisfactory experience of youth, for others, a time for growing responsibilities. Youth as a halcyon phase was limited to a minority of the actors which I met: many described themselves as relieved that they were finally in their thirties and felt grown up. Thirtysomething was regarded as a transitional phase. At this point in the lifecourse, many actors acknowledged that they were ‘settled’ and ‘settlement’ was one of the key concepts of interest to them. However, many also commented on the possible impermanence of such settlement. What we cannot know today is whether adults always perceived of transitions in adulthood, or whether it is intrinsically an element of our social and cultural form. The arguments of Giddens and Beck suggest strategies of increased reflexivity as essential to our contemporary social form. The material and social transformations in Britain towards a deregulated labour market and a disorganised urban life have all produced infrastructural conditions in which the actors can come to act in settings in very specific ways. The focus groups data also shows the actors’; concerns with acting, and evidence of agency at work. I suggest that the concept of generation is remarkably useful in thinking through the dynamics of the actors’ lives, and of the specificity of the transitions in adulthood made, both in terms of subjective experience, and hard, material relations to be navigated and lived through. I found that actors used the concept of generation in order to think about themselves and to ‘explain’ their situation. However, if we are to successfully retrieve Mannheim’s work and bring it into the present, we need to consider needed extensions and transformations of theory, for example, to devise conceptual frameworks which can deal with women’s experience, and the long, slow, turns of social life as lived in the here and now, and thus the everyday.l

Judith Burnett University of East London UK [email protected]

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