The ‘Growing Legs’ of Generation as a Policy Construct: Reviving its Family Meaning

INTRODUCTIONGeneration is a packed social concept, with immense explanatory capacity and policy utility, yet it is a concept fraught with misunderstanding and underestimation in both the social sciences and in popular usage. It is no less fraught in policy. This paper has three objectives:* to explore generation as a socially useful explanatory concept and distinguish it from its close cousins, cohort and age group;* to show how generation has been conceptualized theoretically and historically in ways that are useful today and relevant to social policy;* to contemplate how policy debates can be illuminated by revival of the family concept of generation as a social relational term.Generation as a family concept relies on inequality as a socially cohesive, positive dimension, on relationality, on the simultaneous dynamics of continuity and change, and on the balance between private expectations of vulnerability and public responsibilities for protection of the vulnerable. Policy can benefit from the application of generation in its family meaning in all of these dimensions. Transitions in families are to be expected, not shocks, and aging is a life course experience and stage where generational succession is valued. Older generations or younger generations are not categories or groups with special interests but interconnected as generations with many common interests.GENERATION AS A SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTGeneration as sociological concept has a peculiar status of simultaneous emergent saliency and theoretical invisibility. An enduring puzzle in the social sciences, perhaps the most enduring, is explaining change with continuity over time. Multiple registers of change over time must be considered simultaneously, five of which are:* Change in individual lives, developmentally, i.e., maturation and aging, and socially; This is very much part of what occurs in families.* Change in the lives of those closest to us, families and close friends, those to whom our lives are linked; Families and family-like groups are social locations where linked lives have been most often considered, particularly in policy.* Changes in social and economic contexts of work, in making a living, and in mobility, both geographic and social; These changes connect families with their means of living, and with policies that insure them or not against untoward risks.* Changes in policy regimes in states or non-state agents that provide more or lkss security against the unexpected; Generations in families are often both the starting (the first place we tim for help and support) and ending point (when policy supports prove unviable).* Macro-changes of history as it unfolds. Evidence exists that social policies historically were developed for families, not for workers as is commonly claimed, and it is generation in the family sense that has propelled social policy since.Generation as a sociological concept, in its family meaning, is as important as class, gender, race/ethnicity, in shaping social policies, in illuminating past policies and in aiding sociological understandings of change in all its registers which is of immense importance in the face of policy challenges (Kertzer, 1993; Mannheim, 192811952; McDaniel, 2002; 2004; McMullin, 2004). Generation, in its familial sense, is a connective concept that links individuals to other individuals over time. It also links individual capacities to act and make decisions (what sociology terms 'agency') with social structures that are themselves constantly changing. Generational relations are made and maintained across social time, and underlie the means and processes by which social change is managed and individuals traverse time by making life course transitions (school, work, family, migration, job exit, retraining, re-entry to work, retirement, etc.).Individuals embedded in generational relations cany with them through social time and transitions various advantages and disadvantages which accumulate through lives (Ferraro and Shippee, 2007; O'Rand, 2002). …