Harry Blatterer offers some thoughts about generations and intergenerational relationships and how his conceptual take on generations – both in the familial and the historical sense – is shaping his research approach. An article from the November edition of Nexus, the newsletter of the Australian Sociological Association. Harry Blatterer
Department of Sociology
Macquarie University
I’m currently in the coding stages of a small qualitative study on parental support of first homebuyers and so, if there is such a thing as a premature reflection, this would surely be it. What I hope I can offer nevertheless are some thoughts about generations and intergenerational relationships and how my conceptual take on generations – both in the familial and the historical sense – is shaping my research approach.
1. Generations: everyday talk and sociological silence
Generations are everywhere these days. Whether it is Channel Ten promising ‘an hour of inter-generational laughs’ on Talkin’ ‘bout your Generation, or whether it is politicians exhorting Generation Y to lower their labour market expectations, generational labels – conjured up mostly by marketing firms in order to define target populations – stick well in the popular imagination. These everyday representations are most often used as sense-making devices; they function to explain behaviours which from the viewpoint of other generations appear alien: a lack of commitment to work and love, a general repudiation of responsibility and independence, a strange predilection for ‘connectedness’ as evidenced in the ubiquitous use of information and communication technologies – all this and more, so it seems, are the defining characteristics of generations born after 1970 or thereabouts. The judgements are many, analysis is scarce – and particularly the kind of analysis that as teachers in sociology we are at pains to explain to our students: a contextualizing analysis that takes social change, history, social trends seriously. What we get instead in much of the media is thoroughly decontextualised commentary that boils down to the evaluation of a kind of ‘mass mind’, and thus offers the perplexed the option of an easy wave of the hand that says, ‘Oh yes, the younger generation!’ Not only does the generational blame game make for easy sound bites and sellable entertainment, it is little more than the continuation of the age-old handwringing over the next generation’s inadequacies harnessed by the market.
Where in all this is sociology? The debate on generations is not only driven by marketing firms and business consultants, it is owned by them. This is not to diminish the excellent work done by sociologists in this country and elsewhere who have taken up generation as a sociological concept in their research; it is merely to point out that the scales of public interest are heavily weighted in favour of those who have the means of dissemination of information. Of course, there is more to it than that: as sociologists we are likely to render more complex the taken for granted assumptions of common sense. This is part and parcel of what we do. And to sell complexity is always bound to be more difficult than to sell as truth the simple one-liner. But arguably more importantly still, there is in sociology no consensus about what a generation is and whether as a concept it can be marshalled at all in sociological research.
When it comes to social research beyond familial generations (children, parents, grandparents) it is cohorts rather than generations that take centre stage. While the concept of cohorts, lends itself to statistical comparison due to its neat metrical delimitations, generation is a qualitative concept that for its very imprecision has its own distinct virtues in sociological analysis. For one, if we want concepts to be adequate to commonsense understandings generation is much more suitable – few people identify with a particular cohort, whereas most identify with one generation or another. Also, as heuristic device generation does not preclude a focus on constituents of individual identifications and objective opportunities such as class, gender, age and ethnicity. On the contrary, it allows us to project these contingencies against the background of macro-social developments and thus to fathom social change that cuts across several contemporaneous cohorts. It is in this qualitative sense that Mannheim was concerned to explicate generation as an interpretive schema of social change. In fact, his essay on The Problem of Generations has a strongly polemical bent. In the first section he formulates a general critique of positivism as conceived by Comte and sketches its ‘spirit’ in a memorable statement: ‘Everything is almost mathematically clear: everything is capable of analysis into its constituent elements, the constructive imagination of the thinker celebrates its triumph; by freely combining the available data, he has succeeded in grasping the ultimate, constant elements of human existence, and the secret of History lies almost fully revealed before us.’
It’s important to acknowledge that we have come a long way since Mannheim and that we can’t simply hold methodological debates on either/or grounds when mixed methods are fully integrated in social research. But I would still suggest that sociology’s complicated relationship to the concept of generation accounts for at least some of the silence of sociology in the public arena where assumptions about the postwar generations in particular are fast congealing.
2. Autonomy, homeownership and intergenerational relationships
My own research to date has given a cautious but largely affirmative nod to Mannheim, and it takes both generations and cohorts seriously. In Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty (Berghahn Books, New York & Oxford, 2007) I argue that the specific social conditions under which the baby boomers came of age facilitated the crystallization of a particular model of adulthood because there was a close match between the adult ideal and the conditions for its realization. For example, a policy orientation to fulltime (male) employment enabled ‘settling down’ in a range of ways. While the social conditions for the post-1970 generation have changed quite radically in many respects, expectations about what it means to be an ‘adult’ are slow in changing at best. And because the adult benchmark hasn’t changed, it goes almost without saying that people born after 1970 are all too easily judged as delaying their adulthood, or prolonging their adolescence – a judgement made by social commentators, journalists and social scientists alike. (By the way, I was born before 1970, so I’m not advocating on behalf of my generation here!) I then go on to suggest that adulthood has to do with the social recognition of full personhood, a two-way process between individuals and their social environments, institutions, etc. and that the hallmark of contemporary modalities of adulthood is a recognition deficit. For the post-1970 generation, whose members came of age at a time when the turn to neoclassical economics and neoliberal politics was in full swing, that recognition deficit is constituted by systemic recognition (e.g. recognition by the labour market of their flexibility and mobility) and discursive misrecognition (by commentators and social scientists). I argue that this deficit in recognition is at the core of the uncertainties concerning the meaning of adulthood today.
From that research flows my interest in independence, responsibility and commitment as central cultural markers of adulthood/personhood. And because homeownership is one of Australia’s long-standing social markers of adulthood in those terms, I have recently turned to one of its enabling social mechanisms: intergenerational relationships. In my research on Parental Support of First Homebuyers – a preliminary study funded by Macquarie University – I focus on intrafamilial generations (parents and children) against the background of generational change in the historical sense.
There is little research in Australia about what role parental support plays in young adults’ decisions to enter the Australian housing market. This research project aims to investigate the role of private, intergenerational transfers in young adults’ capacities to enter the home-buyers market. I focus on three types of intergenerational transfers: (1) direct material support (loans, gifts, inheritances, co-purchases, etc.); (2) indirect material support (rent assistance, co-residence, health insurance, etc.); (3) non-material support (emotional support, advice)
A number of key questions for the research arise. Addressing these questions has implications for housing affordability, but it is also designed to provide insights into intergenerational relationships that go beyond material exchange relations:
• Under what conditions, how and with what consequences do parents support their children’s first home purchases?
• Under what conditions, how and with what consequences do children accept, request or expect parental support for their first home purchase?
• Why and how do parents and children construct stories about those situations where financial support and familial intimacy intertwine?
• What economic and policy developments drive these intergenerational transfers?
• What do these support relationships tell us about transformations in intergenerational relationships (both intrafamilial and historical) at large?
The target population is first home buyers in the 25-34 age group. But I also compare contemporary young adults’ experiences with those of their baby boomer parents and hear what the latter have to say about the relationships with their children.
Some preliminary insights
Intergenerational relationships are particularly interesting in the context of autonomy because values around adult independence are in are tensions with other values which have equally deep cultural roots. and to which some of the interview material I have collected speaks. For instance, the belief that parents ought to lend a helping hand commensurate with ‘the natural order of things’. The normative model of family solidarity is thus in tension with the normative model of adult independence, because parental support may well prolong the very dependence which that support is supposed to help overcome. But here I find cause to wonder about the normative good ‘adult independence’. It has become clear to me while on the level of rhetoric – in public as much as during some of the interviews – much is made of independence, there is an equally strong recognition that parents and children, given its members interact in some form, are always interdependent, if not necessarily in material terms, then in emotional terms; that adult independence is a kind of normative fiction. It is worth pondering, then, what the historical and cultural elements behind the fiction of independence are.
Also, sometimes sons or daughters may feel less than overjoyed at taking on obligations that come with that support, and so love, devotion and gratitude may well live side by side with guilt, indifference and resentment.
But what about the parents? Some find motivation to support their children’s endeavours not in order to hasten their (and their own) independent living, but in order to keep a measure of control over the children’s lives; to get them to stop a nomadic, travelling lifestyle, for instance, as one mother told me. But they may also want their children to continue to live with them under the same roof for a while not just to help them service the mortgage, but to enjoy their company or specific aspects thereof. These instances point to the intersection of material resources and non-material goods; to the interconnectedness of economic wherewithal and personal needs for intimacy.
Keeping the possibilities of contradictory attitudes and tension-rich feelings open is central to my approach. Recent developments in family theory are helpful in this regard. In a decisive move away from the ‘solidarity model’, which takes for granted intra-familial support, theories of ‘ambivalence’ recognise precisely the tensions I have alluded to here; and their most convincing versions retain a critical edge as they recognise that the ambivalence suffusing intergenerational attitudes is inseparable from social forces; that social issues and cultural trends cut across the normative expectations of family solidarity; and that thus intergenerational relationships are best approached against the background of social and cultural change over time.
Harry Blatterer is lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University.
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