ABSTRACT
This chapter has sought to disentangle the family of three time based, historicising concepts of lifecourse, cohort and generation, which address the continuity of society in the face of the implacable fact of the death of the individuals of which society is composed. This constant 'personnel replacement' as Ryder terms it creates social systems of acculturation to manage social succession. The chapter explores the differences between cohorts and generations, and shows the first as the creature of the researchers and the latter as self-defined and active entities with ragged borders. It also explores the genaeological strands of postwar generation theory that there were for purposes of a convenient and perhaps overly tidy classification of three main categories. These were Generations as Social Agency, Generations as Inter-Generational Social Structure, and Generational Map-Making. The three categories showed the diversity of fields on which they play and the systems with which they interact in these different forms.
