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Imagining Generations and Social Change
Like many academic studies, mine has a story behind it. In 2006, when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, voters in the state confronted a referendum on gay marriage in the midterm elections. The question before voters was whether or not to amend the state constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman—and thus prevent the courts from overturning the existing statutory ban as unconstitutional (what happened in Massachusetts in 2003, making it the first state to legalize gay marriage).
I was a teaching assistant for a class called “Contemporary American Society,” and the week before the election, I decided it was my civic duty to have my students talk about voting and the issues that would be on the ballot. Predictably, at a liberal campus like Madison’s, the students in my discussion section who supported gay marriage dominated the discussion and were quite vocal about voting “no” on the referendum. As an educator, I felt my role was to try to create space for the other side, so I asked the students, “Why do you think people oppose gay marriage? What reasons do you think they would give to explain why they would vote to define marriage as between one man and one woman?”
Silence. Even in my normally contentious discussion section, my question was met with awkward glances. Tentatively, one student raised his hand and said the opponents were religious and thought that homosexuality was a sin. Then, another student said that they were bigoted and intolerant. That was it. My students were extremely fluent in the language of support for gay marriage, but they had trouble explaining why people opposed it.
I found myself explaining to them the profound sociological significance of de-gendering marriage. Although there is no one “traditional” marriage, and although procreation has not been viewed as essential to marriage for decades, it is true that the opposite-sex couple had been a taken-for-granted part of the institution of marriage in modern Western societies. I explained that the very idea of gay marriage had been unthinkable to most Americans until very recently and that it would be reasonable for someone to be upset that the conventional wisdom was being challenged.
This kind of classroom one-sidedness happens all the time, so normally it would not have made an impression—except for the fact that the editors of the conservative student newspaper at UW–Madison also took a pro–gay marriage stance on the referendum. The Mendota Beacon was an activist newspaper funded by the conservative Leadership Institute, and its motto, “Shining Light on What’s Right,” truthfully advertised the right-wing viewpoint that could be found in its pages.1 Normally, the newspaper followed the Republican Party line on most issues, and when it didn’t, it advocated more conservative principles. But with gay marriage, the editors bucked the party line and advocated that students vote “no” on the constitutional amendment.
Together, these events made me wonder: Could this be a generational issue? Could young people be that much more supportive of gay marriage that even the conservative activists approved? And if so, why? When I began studying public opinion data on the issue, it certainly seemed to be a clear-cut case of generational change. Both tolerance for homosexuality and attitudes about gender equality had liberalized in this manner: not only were young egalitarians replacing older traditionalists in the population, but there was evidence that older Americans were adapting to the changing times by changing their attitudes.2
But when I began reading the research on generations, I was disappointed. In both scientific studies and popular books, I noticed a serious disconnect between what the authors were saying and what the classical theorists of generational change had written. In the popular literature, all I saw were crude stereotypes about Generation X, Millennials, and other broadly defined cohorts. By contrast, the scientific research on generations I found seemed totally unrelated to the popular understanding. There was a vast literature on relations of kinship descent across the life course (e.g., among grandparents, parents, and children) and an equally large literature on cohorts (focused on quantitative measurements of their similarities and differences), but very little research on cohorts’ cultural distinctions. It was as if social scientists found the pop culture stereotypes of generations to be so appalling that they wanted nothing to do with them.
In this chapter, I explain why this puzzling gap in the literature about generations exists and how we can bridge it. First, I trace the source of the divergent meanings of the generation concept back to its classical foundations. Although philosophers throughout history have understood the importance of generational change, I discuss the work of Karl Mannheim, whose theory of generational change has been the most influential.3 Second, I outline five key problems that Mannheim’s theory poses to researchers who want to document and explain generational change. Third, I discuss recent innovations in generational theory and explain the importance of the social imagination; I argue that the concept is well suited to generational theory because it links society-wide changes in history and culture with the psychological processes by which individuals form and articulate their worldviews.
This lays the foundation for the study of gay marriage that follows in subsequent chapters. Generational theory requires us to combine three types of social research: a thorough description of historical events, a precise quantitative analysis of how the population changes over time, and a cultural and cognitive explanation of how young people develop distinctive worldviews, based on their biographical encounter with history while coming of age. When the insights from each of these types of research are combined, we can understand exactly how and why generational change occurs.
Generational Theory
Most people have a decent, intuitive understanding of generational theory. Social scientists have formalized and extended this basic view in important ways, and their efforts have produced some valuable insights. They also have debunked some important myths and can help us avoid common traps in our conventional thinking. But our everyday version of generational theory is a good place to start.
In general, we think of generations as groups of people who share a common location in historical time and who develop distinctive worldviews and patterns of behavior because of the experiences they had while coming of age. Typically, the experiences we have during adolescence and early adulthood create a set of stable, enduring values and orientations that serve as foundations for future thought and behavior. Because different age groups go through this developmental phase during different historical periods, each cohort will be different from the ones before and after it. Sometimes the differences are so dramatic that young people have trouble understanding older people, and vice versa: old people complain about “kids these days,” while young people tell their elders to “get with the times.”
We use this commonsense view to talk about generations in two contrasting ways. First, when we think about groups like the Sixties Generation or Digital Natives, we think of significant historical events or societal trends and how growing up during that time produced a unique group of people. The Sixties Generation came of age during the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and Woodstock, and they fundamentally reshaped American politics and culture with their protests, music, and sexual mores. Similarly, today’s Digital Natives can’t be separated from their smartphones, are in constant contact with their peers, and share everything about their lives online. In this view, generations emerge in response to some notable change to society; only some people belong to those generations, while others do not.
In the other view, everyone belongs to a generation that has some kind of unique worldview, based on the year they were born. The idea that the Millennial Generation follows Generation X, which follows the Baby Boomers, and so on, illustrates this latter view. The temporal boundaries between the generations aren’t always clear, but this succession of generations is thought to follow a fixed interval of time that can be indexed to the life course. The labels capture the idea that people who grow up during different periods in history develop different psychological and behavioral traits that define them as a group.
Although this latter view of generations has some major flaws, which I explain below, both views illustrate generational theory’s basic presumption that the process of coming of age during a particular historical era creates distinctive worldviews and acts as a potent force of change. However, the fuzziness of the character traits that we associate with different generations points to a big problem: generational research often produces one-sided stereotypes of whole age groups. Not everyone who came of age during the 1960s was a liberal hippie. Not all Millennials are constantly checking their smartphones. Stereotypes drive sociologists crazy, and no self-respecting social scientist can accept this basic view of generations, despite its intuitive appeal.
Karl Mannheim, the most influential generational theorist in the social sciences, confronted this challenge in the 1920s, and his discussion of what he called “The Problem of Generations” is Exhibit A for why generational theory is, on one hand, so evocative and important while, on the other hand, so stereotype-prone and resistant to scientific study.4 Mannheim’s theory of generations is worth discussing in detail because it provides the framework for a more comprehensive and nuanced analysis of generational change.5
Mannheim’s thinking on the subject was inspired by the Marxists’ problem of class consciousness. Like most social scientists of his time, Mannheim was familiar with Karl Marx’s theory of communist revolutions and the debates about why workers did not rise up to overthrow capitalism, as Marx predicted. Why did workers fail to develop the working-class consciousness that one might expect of those exploited, paid meager wages for dangerous work, and subjected to terrible living conditions? Mannheim reasoned that developing a working-class consciousness depended upon much more than simply being part of the working class. Workers also had to experience the deprivation that Marx predicted (not all workers did); then they had to be connected to a Communist Party organizer (not all workers were); and then they had to actualize this working-class consciousness by acting on their identity as workers and suppressing other status group identities (like occupation, religion, and ethnicity) that might inhibit mobilization. Only if all four of those conditions were met would the workers rise up against the capitalists.
Mannheim argued that the same logic held for generations. Simply being part of a cohort—being the same age as someone else—wasn’t enough to make you part of a generation. You also had to share a common experience with others in that cohort, develop meaningful personal relationships with others who also shared those experiences, and then develop a common identity, worldview, or set of behaviors to bring your distinctive generation into being.
Mannheim therefore distinguished among four separate generation concepts, the interrelations of which define the problem of generations and serve as the foundation for subsequent generational research. The generation location is what we, today, call a cohort; it refers simply to a group of people defined by a shared location in historical time and space.6 Members of a cohort have nothing in common, other than the fact that they were born during the same historical period into the same society. There is potential for a generation to emerge from a generation location, but something else is required. Put differently, being in the same cohort is a necessary but not sufficient condition to being part of a generation.
Mannheim defines the “generation as an actuality,” or actual generation, as those members of a cohort who “participate in the characteristic social and intellectual currents of their society and period.”7 What Mannheim means is that to become a generation, members of a cohort must share a common and distinctive experience with history that is made possible by their unique position in historical time and in social space. Not only must you be in the same age group in the same society, but you also must occupy similar social positions in that society, such that you experience history in the same way.
An example may clarify this distinction. In a classic study, sociologist Glen Elder Jr. studied the effects that growing up during the Great Depression of the 1930s had on that cohort as they moved through the life course. Generational theory predicts that this would have a variety of long-lasting effects on the cohort’s behaviors and worldviews: we might expect them to be more frugal and to value steady employment more than older and younger cohorts. But this was not true for the whole cohort. Elder found that only people who experienced deprivation firsthand were affected in lasting ways; those who lived through it but weren’t adversely affected by it were no different from other cohorts. Thus, the actual Depression Generation comprised only a certain subgroup of the cohort—those who experienced the historical event directly.8
Before moving on, it is worth pausing to draw out one important implication that this example illustrates regarding the distinction between cohort and generation. In reality, only certain members of a cohort become a part of the actual generation, so our tendency to identify whole cohorts as generations should be presumed wrong until proven otherwise. What separates the actual generation from the cohort are the cultural and social psychological processes that emerge when people experience the unique conditions of history in a particular way. These “social generational” processes translate the experience of history while coming of age into the enduring worldviews and behaviors that we observe in some members of the cohort.9
The third generation concept described by Mannheim is what he called a generation unit. Just as the actual generation is only a subset of the generation location, so too is a generation unit a subset of the actual generation. Mannheim argued that each actual generation is composed of multiple generation units, which are concrete groups that “work up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways.”10 In other words, members of the actual generation experience the same social and historical forces of their era, but they react to them differently. So while some people in the Depression Generation might have joined the Democratic Party, others might have joined the Communist Party. To the extent that people in the actual generation form identifiable, concrete groups that display a shared reaction to their generational experiences, we can speak of generation units.
Many of the groups that come to mind when we think of generations are actually generation units. For example, when someone mentions the Sixties Generation, she is probably thinking of the hippies of the late 1960s who went to Woodstock and protested the Vietnam War or maybe the Civil Rights activists of the early 1960s. These are both generation units because they represent concrete, identifiable groups who reacted to the shared experience of a historical moment in a similar way. Because there are multiple generation units in the actual generation, we should be able to identify other generation units as well. What about the white Southerners who fought against the Civil Rights Movement? Or the young people who became soldiers and fought in the Vietnam War? The fact that we tend to think about some generation units and not others shows just how easy it is to stereotype whole cohorts in the name of generational theory.
It also points us toward the fourth generation concept that Mannheim describes: the generation entelechy. An entelechy is a philosophical concept that refers to something coming into being—the realization of a potential. In this sense, a generation entelechy refers to a particular generational style, identity, or behavior coming into being—the uniqueness of a generation becoming actualized as a real social force. The generation units that we notice and remember created a generation entelechy, though not in isolation. In reality, the generation entelechy emerges out of the relations among generation units with one another and with contemporaries from other cohorts.
Mannheim’s theory of generational change is therefore based on a three-way distinction among groups of people within cohorts, with the generation entelechy being the visible manifestation of the whole process. In essence, multiple generation units sit within the actual generation, while the actual generation is only one part of the generation location. What distinguishes the actual generation from the generation location is a shared experience with history, and what distinguishes among generation units are their divergent reactions to the shared experience.
Let’s take one more example from sociological research to illustrate how these distinctions can make the difference between stereotype and reality. Research has shown that when people are asked to name important historical events that have happened during their lives, they are more likely to name things that occurred during adolescence and early adulthood—just as generational theory predicts. In 1989, sociologists Howard Schuman and Jacqueline Scott showed this to be true for a wide variety of issues, but generational memory of the Civil Rights Movement failed to fit the pattern.11 The reason for this exception was a mystery until sociologist Larry Griffin reanalyzed the data, this time dividing people according to the region of the country in which they lived. He found that people in the South but not those who lived elsewhere were more likely to mention the Civil Rights Movement.12
Griffin’s findings confirm a logical expectation and illustrate the importance of distinguishing between the generation location and the actual generation: because people in the South experienced the Civil Rights Movement more directly than people in the North, it stands to reason that they would be more influenced by it. Thus, in terms of collective memory, the actual Civil Rights Generation is composed of only one fraction of the cohort—those who grew up in the South; and within it are some generation units who supported integration and others who opposed it.
Figure 1.1: The Civil Rights Generation
Note: Based on Griffin, “‘Generations and Collective Memory’ Revisited.”
Even though Mannheim’s theory of generations is consistent with our commonsense view of it, his distinctions among the four generation concepts show just how easy it is to caricature a whole cohort inappropriately and how careful we must be when studying generations scientifically. Considering these examples from the Sixties Generation and the Depression Generation, it should be clear that distinguishing among these generation concepts can make the difference between accurately describing social change and perpetuating generational falsehoods.
Problems of Generational Analysis
Mannheim’s theory of generations is both profound and alluring in the ways it promises to unlock the mystery of how society slowly changes as history evolves and young cohorts replace old ones in the population. However, the complexity of Mannheim’s theory makes it difficult for researchers to fully validate the predictions of generational theory. Specifically, generational theory poses five interrelated problems for social scientists seeking to document and explain generational change.
First, the previous section illustrated the problem of intra-cohort variation—that there are several levels of difference among groups within the cohort. The actual generation is only a subset of a cohort, so one cannot study generations by defining them as cohorts. Moreover, the actual generation consists of multiple generation units, so not all members of an actual generation think and act alike. It should cause no great controversy to assert that not all people of the same age are alike; yet scholars and popular writers routinely equate the actual generation with the cohort or with the generation unit.
Starting first with academic research, it is common for scholars to define intra-cohort variation in terms of generation units (or what are sometimes called “political generations”), because it is clearly true that different groups in society would respond differently to events like the Vietnam War or 9/11.13 However, scholars rarely make the distinction between cohort and generation in tandem with the distinction between generation and generation unit. Thus, most research never accounts for multiple levels of intra-cohort variation.
If there were an act of original sociological sin to which we could trace the consistent failure of social scientific research to distinguish between the cohort and the actual generation, it would be the publication of Norman Ryder’s classic 1965 essay on the cohort concept, in which he largely transposes Mannheim’s entire generational theory onto the “generation location.”14 Ryder’s essay helped to establish the field of cohort analysis as an important sociological subject, but he did so by flattening the multilayered richness of Mannheim’s theory.15
When American sociologists, inspired by the social turmoil of the 1960s, set out to measure exactly what was distinctive about the Sixties Generation, they used the cohort concept as their measure. The researchers usually found that anything distinctive about the cohort disappeared once they took educational attainment and political ideology into account. In other words, what made the Sixties Generation distinct was not the fact that they came of age during a unique historical period, but the fact that more liberals were going to college than ever before. Indeed, the uprising of the New Left during the late 1960s was largely centered on college campuses among political liberals. So when scholars set out to measure the unique attitudes of the Sixties Generation, they found that education and ideology, not age, explained the difference.16
These findings are entirely consistent with Mannheim’s theory, taking into account the fact that only certain subgroups of a cohort would be part of an actual generation, and that there would be many distinct generation units within that; but because Ryder had successfully redefined the problem in terms of cohorts, scholars interpreted their findings as evidence against generational theory. Literature reviews from that period confronted the problem that researchers never could confirm their hypotheses about the existence of the Sixties Generation, despite what appeared at first to be clear evidence that it did.17
Social scientist David Kertzer’s solution to this problem unintentionally reinforced the one-dimensional flattening of generational theory in terms of the cohort.18 Noting the many different meanings of the word generation, Kertzer argued that the word should be restricted to its narrow, kinship-descent meaning and that it should not be used to describe differences between age groups. Thereafter, in American sociology at least, the field of cohort analysis flourished, as did research into (kinship-descent) generations; but generational theory was emptied of its research warrant. Several outstanding empirical studies inspired by Mannheim’s theory were produced after Kertzer’s 1983 article, but sustained attempts to analyze generational change declined after the theory’s apparent failure to account for the Sixties Generation.19
Popular writers on generations committed a different sort of sin. Whereas academic researchers tried their hardest to measure actual generational distinctions in terms of cohorts, popular commentators tended to construct one-dimensional stereotypes of whole cohorts on the basis of a single generation unit, making little effort to acknowledge the variation among its members. Social scientists, in a way, needed to jettison the complexities of generational theory in order to produce rigorous, academic studies of cohorts; by contrast, popular writers found the cultural generalizations to be more appealing to general audiences. Their books may be compelling and provocative, but only because they traffic in half-truths.
Take, for example, several notable books describing the Millennial Generation. If you believe the cynical analyses of English professor Mark Bauerlein and psychologist Jean Twenge, authors of The Dumbest Generation and Generation Me, respectively, these young Americans are the most selfish, individualistic, narcissistic, and academically ill-prepared cohorts in recent history.20 By contrast, if you believe Neil Howe and William Strauss, authors of Millennials Rising, or Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, authors of Millennial Momentum, these same youth are the next great civic saviors of American society—more altruistic, politically engaged, and hardworking than previous cohorts.21 The comically different caricatures that these authors have created testifies to the failure of their enterprise: because they overlook differences within the cohort, they merely select some stereotypical traits from particular subgroups to apply to the entire cohort.22
The problem of intra-cohort variation is, to some extent, both amplified and caused by the problem of measurement. For social scientists, the problem of measurement is both simple and fundamental because we must base our studies on what we can measure. We have tools to measure cohorts, generation units, and generation entelechies; but until recently, social scientists did not specify the procedures to measure Mannheim’s “actual generation,” even though that concept is the crux of the whole theory. Cohorts are easily measured using quantitative surveys: you simply ask people what year they were born. Generation units and generation entelechies are also easy to measure because those are the most visible manifestations of change.
But the actual generation—the subset of the cohort who shares an experiential encounter with history but does not react to it in a particular way—is harder to identify by conventional methods. The actual generation can be identified not by either similarities or differences alone, but by a particular pattern of similarities and differences, both between and within cohorts. The works by Elder and Griffin discussed above are examples of how it may be done, but a commitment to distinguish the actual generation from the cohort and from the generation unit is essential. Had the social scientists studying the Sixties Generation interpreted their quantitative studies of the cohort with this in mind, they might have reached different conclusions about generational theory.23 In recent decades, social scientists have developed new methods for measuring the processes that distinguish the actual generation from the cohort, as I discuss below.
The problem of measurement is also linked to the problem of perspective. Any scholar who wants to conduct a study must adopt a particular methodological perspective or approach in order to carry it out. From the formulation of a research question to the choice of methods to the analytic procedures, one’s orientation toward the object of interest is consequential. What makes this a problem is that rigorous analysis of generational change must combine three distinct perspectives simultaneously, and it is difficult to overcome because researchers tend to specialize in specific subject areas and methods, to the neglect of others. Thus, it would be quite difficult to test generational theory in its entirety in a single study.24
Adopting a demographic perspective to the problem of generations demands that the researcher concentrate on disaggregating age, cohort, and period effects in longitudinal, quantitative data. Such studies can differentiate the amount of the total change over time that is due to cohort replacement from the amount that is due to intra-cohort attitude change. Additionally, they can provide clues about how much demographic and attitudinal factors are correlated with the observed generational change. However, longitudinal studies from a demographic perspective alone are insufficient to fully explain how and why change happens.25
Adopting a narrative, historical perspective to the problem of generations demands that the scholar concentrate on qualitative, historical research to determine the boundaries of historical periods, the nature of critical events and turning points, and the substantive facts of the change. Such studies can produce a description of how individuals, institutions, and organizations that make up society changed from one era to the next. Coupled with the demographic perspective, a historical study can define meaningful boundaries of cohorts and suggest plausible causes and covariates of generational change.
Adopting a cultural, interpretive perspective to the problem of generations demands that the scholar concentrate on analyzing how people’s worldviews are shaped by the historical events that they experience while coming of age. Such studies can produce an explanation of the cultural and social psychological mechanisms that cause changes in the larger social structure (documented by the historian) to result in the formation of unique attitudes, orientations, and behaviors among members of the actual generation. The first two perspectives alone are insufficient because the actual generation is distinguished from the cohort by cultural and social psychological processes that are often best studied from an interpretive perspective.
Fourth, the problem of reification is that even though generations are most easily defined as groups of people, the generation is really an active and ongoing process, not a static and unchanging group. In one respect, the problem is grammatical: “generation” is both a collective noun and an abstract noun. It refers both to a group of people and to the process of generating, and since it is often easier to grasp abstract concepts by personifying them, we tend to think of generations as people rather than as processes.
The issue is not merely grammatical, however; it has major empirical and theoretical implications. Empirically, it is one thing to measure a group of people, but another to measure a process; so how you conceive of the thing you are measuring both affects and is affected by your research method. Theoretically, the relation of a group to a process is essential to understand because different groups may exhibit varying levels of agency in the overall process of generational change. To what extent are young generations created by forces outside their control, and to what extent are they active creators of generational change? Some groups, like the Depression Generation, appear to be passive victims of circumstance; while other groups, like the Sixties Generation, appear to be the source of their own generational distinction.
This is not an “either-or” dilemma but a “both-and” conundrum. We have to understand the generation-as-group as both a cause and an effect of the generation-as-process, and we can gain some clarity on this issue only if we focus on the process, not the people. There is no consensus on the nature of the generational process, but much of the existing research treats the group as an outcome of the process. Strong evidence exists for both the impressionable years hypothesis and the persistence hypothesis—that late adolescence and early adulthood are the phases of the life course in which people develop foundational attitudes and orientations, which then remain relatively stable throughout the life course.26 Scholars have also used constructs like socialization and generational imprinting to describe the process that creates new generational groups.27
More recent theories view young generations as agents of change, not just as products of forces that are beyond their control. Concepts like cohort norm formation and historical participation suggest that young generations are actively creating social change.28 Similarly, scholars inspired to think of generations in more contemporary theoretical terms—in Bourdieuian terms of habitus, field, and doxa, or in terms that derive from a variety of discursive, performative, and queer theories—start from the implicit assumption that structure and agency are mutually intertwined, and therefore that young generations both shape and are shaped by the generational process.29
In short, it is easy to reify the generation, stamping a group of people with a label that is actually about a set of ongoing, active processes; but we do ourselves a disservice if we forget the process meaning of generation when we talk about people as generations. It is not wrong to use the term as a collective noun, but when we do, we must remember that it is perhaps nothing more than a convenient shorthand way of referring to those groups who have created and endured the things that both distinguish them from others and have the potential to transform society. Studying the generational process is therefore of utmost importance for those who want to understand what generations are and how they work.
The fifth and final problem facing people who want to understand generational change is the problem of boundaries, especially the temporal boundaries that define periods and cohorts and the substantive boundaries that define the scope of generational distinction. These boundaries are defined in relation to each other and to the historical events, trends, and structural changes that give young cohorts “fresh contact” with society.
In general, there are two broad approaches to the problem of boundaries: the imprint paradigm and the pulse-rate paradigm.30 Mannheim’s theory and other social scientific studies like this one are examples of the former, which takes a particularistic, inductive approach to identifying boundaries, while latter approach is universalistic and deductive. Unfortunately, the pulse-rate paradigm has tremendous popular appeal and has produced enduring popular beliefs about cycles of generations, despite it being little more than social astrology. Therefore, it is necessary to explain the problems with the pulse-rate paradigm before turning to the more scientific approach.
The pulse-rate paradigm assumes that generations are tied to the biological rhythm of the life cycle (birth, adolescence, adulthood, etc.), that a society’s whole population can be divided into a series of nonoverlapping cohorts of fifteen to twenty-five years in length, that these cohorts develop “peer personalities” that distinguish them from their elders and juniors, and that the history of societies is marked by repeating generational cycles.31 This approach has a philosophical pedigree that has given it a gloss of authority and some cultural staying power. Most notably, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset argued that generations, like our life stages, are fifteen years in length, and that Western Europe’s cultural, political, and economic history can be explained according to the regular fifteen-year generational cycle beginning in 1626 (why, the year of René Descartes’s thirtieth birthday of course!).32
Historian Hans Jaeger rightfully observes that “the grotesque ineptness of this thesis prohibits any closer scrutiny,” yet the foremost popular commentators on generations in the United States, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss, use this very approach.33 Together, they authored seven books on generations and founded a private consulting business to help organizations develop strategies for dealing with generational change. In their master treatise, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, Strauss and Howe propose that life stages and generations are twenty-two years in length and that the generations constitute a four-part repeating cycle, with each adopting one of four peer personalities—Idealists, Reactives, Civics, and Adapters—depending upon the part of the cycle in which they come of age.34
It is this view of generations that gives rise to the very idea of Generation X, Millennials, and iGen (or Generation Z, or whatever label they get stuck with), which are almost purely social fictions.35 By contrast, the Baby Boom cohort is actually a meaningful group that is defined demographically; because of its size, the Baby Boom cohort affects many aspects of society—from employment rates to government budgets.36 The same cannot be said about the younger generations, which have been concocted as the pulse-rate successors to the Baby Boomers, but which primarily serve as Rorschach blots upon which different groups project their prejudices.
The pulse-rate view of generations has all the appeal and problems of astrology: it is a deceptive mix of existential complexity with elegant simplicity that invites us to focus on confirming evidence and overlook disconfirming evidence. We want to believe because of the power of suggestion—and it would be so cool if it were true! Unfortunately, society is so messy, complex, and shaped by the unpredictable actions of people with free will that social scientists have long given up the search for the sort of natural laws that appear in math, physics, and chemistry.
The imprint paradigm, exemplified by Mannheim, and the pulse-rate paradigm thus constitute fundamentally opposite views about how generations are formed: the imprint paradigm begins from observable social change and asks how generations emerging from the flow of chronological time could have caused the change, whereas the pulse-rate paradigm imposes a single, arbitrary chronological time scheme indiscriminately onto the social world and forces observable social change to conform to it. When reputable research organizations like the Pew Research Center fail to distinguish between the two and adopt the labels and methods for defining periods and cohorts from the pulse-rate paradigm, their well-intentioned generational research becomes deceptive generational mythology. The age differences between cohorts in whatever attitudes they are measuring may really be there, but simply adopting labels like “Generation X” and “Millennials” obscures the real cohort and period boundaries that define them. For example, the analysis in this book shows that the gay marriage generation comes from the cohort born after 1974—this includes people from both the Generation X and Millennial cohorts. All of the research that singles out Millennials for being more supportive than their elders not only misleads people about who the real generation is and what the real dynamics of change are, but also perpetuates the mythology that Millennials constitute a meaningful cohort at all.37
Social scientists must take the particularistic, inductive approach of the imprint paradigm to defining generational boundaries. The temporal boundaries of periods should be determined by examining the historical events, trends, and changes in society that distinguish qualitatively different conditions in which people live. Depending upon the topic of interest (gay marriage or something else), the temporal markers of periods will vary.
Determining the temporal boundaries of cohorts is even more challenging. They should be based on the period boundaries, but altered to center on the psychological process of coming of age during late adolescence/early adulthood. There is an inherent “fuzziness” of the temporal boundaries with respect to cohorts because different people mature at different ages; moreover, people’s impressionable years probably depend upon the issue. For example, we tend to become sexually mature much earlier than we become politically aware. Thus, the temporal boundaries of cohorts should be based on period boundaries but modified to take into account the variable process of coming of age.
Following the imprint paradigm, the substantive scope of generational distinction will be narrow and particular, not broad and all-encompassing. What makes an actual generation with respect to gay marriage will be different from what makes an actual generation with respect to social media use. Members of the actual generation will be distinguished from the cohort as a whole by the generational processes that set them apart both from their elders and juniors and from other age mates. Thus, even if some people in the same cohort happen to both support gay marriage and use social media frequently, it makes more sense to view them as belonging to two separate generations.
In sum, the problem of boundaries with respect to generational theory requires the analyst to inductively determine the temporal boundaries of periods and cohorts, delimit the boundaries of generational distinction in terms of substantive scope, and identify the generational processes that distinguish the actual generation from the cohort. These tasks involve significant work, combining multiple research perspectives, and the results will not lend themselves to alluring soundbites about Millennials or other popular stereotypes. But this is exactly what must be done in order to rescue generational theory from the suffocation of pop culture clichés.
How do I handle these five problems in this book? This study combines research about generational change in opinions about gay marriage from all three perspectives. In Chapter 2, I adopt a historical perspective on the gay marriage generation to derive the temporal boundaries that define unique historical periods. I use that periodization to define the cohorts for the longitudinal, demographic analysis in Chapter 3, which examines how public opinion is affected by cohort replacement, intra-cohort attitude change, and related covariates. Last, in Chapters 4 to 7, I adopt a cultural, interpretive perspective to distinguish among different levels of intra-cohort variation and to determine how generational processes contributed to the rapid evolution in Americans’ views of gay marriage. Altogether, this book shows how the gay marriage generation arose because of the interactions among activists, celebrities, political and religious leaders, and ordinary people, who together reconfigured Americans’ social imagination of homosexuality in a way that made gay marriage seem normal, logical, and good.
Social Generation and the Social Imagination
The gay marriage generation is what scholars would call a social generation, which I define as the set of cultural and social psychological processes whereby a young cohort’s encounter with society during the historical period in which they “come of age” shapes their worldviews. Social generational processes distinguish the actual generation from the cohort, so to the extent that we apply the “gay marriage generation” label to a group of people, it would be to that subset of the cohort who developed a unique worldview because of their encounter with history.
Where does the phrase social generation come from, and why do we need it? In 1984, one year after David Kertzer recommended that sociologists define generation narrowly in terms of kinship descent and drop the cohort-related meaning of the word from the scholarly lexicon, historian Anthony Esler published an unassuming article in the Journal of Political and Military Sociology, in which he argued that the reliance of social scientists on opinion surveys to measure generational change resulted in a shallow understanding of Mannheim’s theory.38 Referring to Mannheim’s “actual generation” as the “social generation,” Esler argued that social generations are distinguished from cohorts by a shared collective mentality and that social scientists should take a qualitative and interpretive approach to generational analysis, in contrast to the quantitative and positivistic approach of cohort analysis.39
In effect, Esler agreed with Kertzer that the research on generations coming out of the 1970s was flawed but disagreed with his solution. The British sociologist Jane Pilcher would later reconcile Kertzer’s and Esler’s competing recommendations, using the phrase social generation to distinguish cohort-related generational phenomena from kinship-related ones.40 By preserving Kertzer’s distinction between generation and cohort and defining the social generation as a distinct phenomenon, these scholars opened the door for a parallel research agenda to emerge: one that focused on the cultural and social psychological processes that shape the worldviews and behaviors of young cohorts.
As described above, there is no consensus on the exact nature of the generational process, and there may be many different generational processes that work in different ways, depending on the circumstance. For the case of the gay marriage generation, I will argue that the social imagination is the generational process that caused support for gay marriage to increase so quickly and in the manner documented by scholars. I do not believe that the social imagination is the only such process or that it will apply to every case of generational change, but it is the theoretical explanation that emerged from the analysis of my interviews (especially Chapter 5).
To best understand the social imagination, we should start with our everyday understanding of imagination, then move to its broader psychological meaning, and finally advance to the sociological level. Typically, we think of imagination as fantasy: Children have wonderful imaginations. Not only can they think of things that don’t really exist, like unicorns, but they have a tremendous capacity to do so. In our everyday usage, imagination is the capacity to produce mental images of things that exist only in our minds.
However, imagination is not just about fantasy; it is what we use to comprehend reality. Whether one imagines something that exists or something that doesn’t—a horse instead of a unicorn—the process is the same. In psychology, the imagination is the individual’s capacity to produce mental images of any nonpresent phenomena—things outside the current realm of perception. When an individual uses her imagination, she activates her existing mental structures—schemas, prototypes, memories, and so on—to create a mental image that exists inside her mind.
For example, imagine stumbling upon a news story about the problems of piracy in the Indian Ocean. A typical American who reads the story might immediately, unconsciously activate her cultural schema for pirates—guys with beards, swords, and eye patches sailing around the Caribbean Sea three hundred years ago on wooden ships looking for treasure. This stereotype of a pirate, learned through some combination of popular culture and history books, might help you understand some aspects of the story—like the threat piracy poses to ships transporting cargo—but it might make it surprising to learn that piracy happens today, that it happens in places like the Strait of Malacca, and that pirates use modern technology like guns and motorboats. Reading the story would then prompt you to reimagine piracy as you strive to comprehend the new information.41
This exercise, however trivial, illustrates the dynamic interplay between the imagination and the cultural schemas that it utilizes. Whether we use our imagination consciously (in slow, deliberate cognition) or unconsciously (in fast, automatic cognition), the mind uses cultural schemas—a type of mental structure in which a concept is defined by a collection of cultural associations we have with it.42 Schemas are essential resources for the imagination. The typical American’s schema for “pirate” might include associations like “man,” “sword,” “eye patch,” “wooden sailing ship,” “illegal,” “treasure,” and many more—a collection of attributes that automatically come to mind during the process of imagination. For the most part, these cultural schemas confront us as taken-for-granted entities because we did not actively choose to make them; like it or not, these schemas affect how our mind processes information, how we behave, and how we communicate.
Although all human minds use schemas to make sense of the experiences we have in the world, the exact pattern of associations that make up our schemas vary by culture: our life experiences, social networks, and media representations all influence the nature and strength of associations that define our schemas. Thus even though all humans have schemas, and even though we are all forced to live with our schemas to some extent (we did not choose to make them, although we can work to change them), we cannot simply ignore the process by which they emerged. The distinctively cultural nature of our schemas requires us to question why a given association exists. Put simply, if Captain Hook is our prototypical pirate, then it should be obvious why we can’t simply assume that a schema is natural. Cultural schemas are not given; they are made.
So how do cultural schemas get made? I argue that they are made (and continually remade) through the process of social imagination. I add the word social to emphasize the fact that the imagination is not just individual and cognitive, but also collective and cultural (just like our schemas). The process of imagination might happen inside individuals’ heads, but it cannot be a coincidence that the mental images that individuals produce when they imagine are so broadly similar to others in the same group. The imagination, therefore, is not a purely cognitive endeavor carried out by isolated individuals; it is fundamentally social. Your imagination is powerfully shaped by the broad cultural context of your life in society.
Formally, we can define the social imagination as the process by which collectives jointly create and modify the cultural schemas that individuals encounter and internalize through social experience and that provide the cognitive foundation for future action.43 Philosophically, the theory of social imagination (and, not coincidentally, modern schema theory) is grounded in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in which he posits the “transcendental power of imagination” as the essential, synthetic capacity that combines individual intuition and understanding, thus rendering human knowledge and experience possible.44 Durkheim’s theory of collective representations effectively transposed Kant’s theory to the social level, while Castoriadis was the first to argue that the social imaginary is the essential ontological root of all sociohistorical phenomena.45
The theory of social imagination synthesizes current research in cognition and culture to model the dynamic interaction between mind and society.46 In essence, society—via the social imagination—furnishes individuals with the cultural schemas that serve as the basis for the mind’s operation and for future action in the world. Individuals use their cultural schemas, prototypes, and concepts when they process new information and when they say or do things. Then, the results of what the individual says and does feed back into the collective, social process of imagination—by reinforcing, modifying, or undermining the dominant cultural schemas.
In psychology, the significance of the imagination has been illustrated with respect to stereotypes. Research shows that stereotypes furnish some of the raw materials of the imagination, and when people are asked to imagine different kinds of people, attitudes are either attenuated or reinforced, depending upon the consistency of the mental image with existing stereotypes.47 For example, when psychologist Irene Blair and her colleagues asked research participants to imagine a strong woman, they found that gender stereotypic attitudes were reduced, compared to those asked to imagine something that was not counterstereotypical.
In other social sciences, scholars have conceptualized the imagination at the collective, cultural level as an ongoing, contested process of meaning making in which social actors create, use, modify, and challenge the meanings of collective representations. In the earliest and most famous usage, anthropologist Benedict Anderson provocatively defines nations as “imagined communities” and shows how people’s feelings of nationhood and nationalism are nourished by cultural objects like maps and newspapers.48 Fellow anthropologist Arjun Appadurai develops the concept further, describing the imagination as a social capacity that builds on a group’s vast background of taken-for-granted understandings and that acts as a resource for social behavior.49 Philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the social imaginary forms a link between structure and agency because it is both factual and normative, contains an implicit moral order, and functions as a cultural repertoire from which we draw in practice.50
This conception has proven useful in empirical research, too. Sociologist Luc Boltanski argues that the capacity of imagination is essential for developing empathy for distant, suffering others, and sociologist Andrew Perrin shows that the “democratic imagination” is a capacity that empowers ordinary citizens to formulate possible solutions to social problems.51 Finally, communications scholar Shani Orgad demonstrates how media representations in a globalizing world enrich our imaginations by furnishing them with such raw materials as cultural scripts, stereotypes, and narratives.52
How is the social imagination different from other sociological concepts like collective representation, understanding, and framing? In essence, the process of social imagination differs in that it is keyed to a specific cognitive process—just like the notion of collective memory must be theorized in relation to the psychological process of remembering.53 By contrast, Durkheim’s theory of collective representation has no particular cognitive referent; understandings are best conceived as the result of the process of imagination; and framing works psychologically through processes that are more slow and deliberate than the schematic processing of the imagination.54 To be sure, collective representations, understandings, and framing do influence the imagination, but the concept of social imagination is valuable because it indexes one mechanism of social, cultural, and communicative influence to its cognitive counterpart.
Because this book is about gay marriage, let’s translate this into relevant terms. Take, for example, the phrase that’s so gay. Research shows that phrases like this draw on two schematic associations: gay is bad or deviant, and gay is insufficiently masculine.55 People who use such phrases may not consciously believe such things to be true and may even be supportive of gay rights, but their continued use of this language perpetuates the implicit schema of homosexuality as deviant and deficient. By contrast, when we become aware of such implicit associations and consciously refrain from saying such things, our actions have the effect (however small) of undermining the imagination of homosexuality as a negative thing.
This book examines how the social imagination of homosexuality and gay marriage has changed over time at the collective level and how individuals give voice to it when they talk about these subjects in interaction with others. Chapter 2 illustrates the process of social imagination at the collective, cultural level by analyzing how popular discourse and media representations about homosexuality in the public sphere change over time. Chapter 5 measures the process of imagination at the individual level by analyzing the metaphors, analogies, and figurative tropes that people articulate in discourse. These forms of speech all indirectly, obliquely give voice to the cultural schemas that usually remain unexpressed. By analyzing the social imagination at both levels, we will see how changes in the social imagination of homosexuality are related to the generational change in attitudes about gay marriage in the United States.
Conclusion
The overarching aim of this book is to fulfill the promise of generational theory, as laid out by Karl Mannheim: to account for how cohort replacement, combined with the manifold mysterious ways that an individual’s biography interacts with history, works to slowly, inexorably change society over time. This goal has eluded both scholars and popular commentators because of the five problems that confront generational analysts; but advances in social scientific theory and methods finally allow us to measure generational change from three perspectives and triangulate the results to form a coherent account. Moreover, this book offers the theory of social imagination as an important tool for interpretive social scientists who strive to understand what people say and do—to fully understand the intersection of culture and cognition and the dynamic interaction of individual and society.
Practically speaking, this book uses the case of gay marriage to develop a deeper understanding of the process of generational change. The heart of the book (Chapters 4–7) follows a qualitative, interpretive approach to Mannheim’s problem of generations in an effort to uncover the generational processes that caused support for gay marriage in the United States to increase so quickly. This approach focuses on the cultural and social psychological processes that have caused young cohorts to be more supportive than older cohorts, and also that have caused members of older cohorts to rethink their prior views. With respect to gay marriage, I aim to solve a puzzle that has so far eluded analysts and commentators: how one of the most prominent battles in the culture wars moved so quickly from being a lopsided rout on the part of gay marriage opponents to a resounding victory for supporters.
By taking an interpretive approach, this book makes an epistemological commitment to develop a multidimensional account of how people make sense of the world in the ways they do. However, interpretive social scientists are not free to interpret a person’s actions in any way they choose; our interpretations must be faithful to the broader social context in which people live. In this case, interpretive analysis must be triangulated with the other two perspectives required by generational theory: a historical analysis of the events that would cause young cohorts to imagine the world differently than their elders, and a demographic analysis of how public opinion changed from some combination of age, cohort, and period effects. In the next two chapters, I lay out precisely the historical and demographic parameters for the interpretive analysis of generational change in attitudes about gay marriage.
All three approaches, taken together, show how the gay marriage generation was both a product and a cause of social change. The gay marriage generation emerged because of the changing social imagination of homosexuality, and its effects on both the court of law and the court of public opinion brought about the ultimate legalization of gay marriage in the United States.
