ABSTRACT
The relationship of young people to the generations that surround them, either younger or older, has been of interest to sociologists, psychologists and policy-makers for some time, with the categories of childhood, youth and adolescence, adulthood and old/thirdage all becoming both important conceptual tools and widely used units of analysis. However, despite a wealth of literature from the past fifty or so years, the concept and meaning of youth and generation remain complex – at the same time youth is an age that is both ambiguous and ill defined but is also a time of life that is perceived to be the most difficult for individuals with the problem of making the transition from education to work, the problem of ‘growing up’ and the problem of youth culture with its associated moral panics (see Brake 1985; Clay 2003). It becomes easier then to adopt Mannheim’s view of generation as ‘a common location in the social and historical process’ (Mannheim 1952: 291) and group young people into homogenous generations labelled ‘delinquents’, ‘Baby Boomers’, ‘Generation X’, ‘Generation Y’, and so on. Yet how we understand these groupings, and their relationship to older generations, remains heavily contested and largely dependent upon the perspective adopted in the literature – be it functionalist, structuralist, lifecourse, cohort, transitional or interpretavist (see Pilcher 1995). As MacDonald et al. (2001) have argued, historically the study of youth developed
with research focused on one of two distinct strands. Early studies of youth, dating from the 1960s, were interested in what can be termed as youth culture and the associated moral panics around this life stage. Later studies, which emerged in the 1970s, were more interested in youth transitions from school to work and understanding how young people made the transition into work and on to adulthood. However, as Macdonald et al. (ibid.: 4.9) argue, ‘there is more to becoming an adult than simply making a transition from school to work’. As such, the complexity of youth transitions is now becoming more widely understood as the focus has shifted from looking merely at issues of youth culture and/or the move from school to work to encompass other significant elements such as the transition out of the family home to independent living. Alongside the broadening of the debate around transition it is increasingly argued that not only
have transitions to work become more complex, but other transitions at this life stage, based on traditional signifiers of adulthood such as independent living, marriage and secure work/career have become more protracted than past transitions. One of the most important recent contributions to these debates has come from Wyn
and Woodman (2006) and their argument that the concept of generation is far a more powerful analytical tool than ‘youth in transition’. Wyn and Woodman (ibid.: 498) argue that ‘youth as transition’ is too psychosocial, too developmental, too deterministic, that it underestimates the importance of young people’s own subjectivities and that it leads to youth being viewed as a ‘linear process or position on the lifecourse’ between childhood and adulthood.
