Social Generation Concept Essay

Social Generation Concept in Social Science Research

Desarta Spahiu PhD (C.)

Abstract

This paper aims to show that the social generation concept, when accurately formulated, is an important tool, empirically as well as in theory, for academics who seek a richer, more methodical data of how and why societies are transformed through cohort substitution. Scholars, mostly outside the United States, have begun describing how the social generation as a cultural concept, provides new insights into the process of social change caused by cohort replacement. While theoretically compelling, these arguments still suffer from a lack of empirical evidence to support them, as did the older formulations of the generation concept. This illustrates the cultural resonance and power of the word generation because its meaning and usage has been almost entirely unaffected by academic efforts to dictate its appropriate boundaries. Academic

Taken together, they help account for the marginal status of the concept in the social sciences in the late 20th Century. As I will argue, because of these problems, the large, socio-cultural generation concept was abandoned by scholars in the mid-1980s in favor of narrower, more specific concepts. Despite the relative absence of social research and theorizing about this broad generation concept, the term has persisted in other popular and academic treatises on the subject. As a result, the stereotyped and caricatured conception of generations and generational change promoted by popular culture has gone accepted, and is even supported by scholars. In recent years, the cultural turn in the social sciences has provided researchers with new hypothetical tools and new methods for studying the broad socio-cultural generation concept in ways that overcome some of its