Visionary
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Making Sense of Generation Y 

Young people and generations

Let us clarify what we mean by 'young people' and 'Generation Y'. The terms 'youth' and 'young people' conjure up many images. Young people are seen as creative, beautiful, enthusiastic, carefree, passionate, energetic, fun, full of potential and hope for the future. The Anglican Church's report, Youth A Part reminds us of the way young people's accomplishments contribute to society. At the same time, young people are also seen as moody, rebellious, vulnerable, troubled, troublesome and dangerous. Newspaper headlines draw attention to the high rate of teenage pregnancies, young male suicides, teenage drug alcohol problems, youth homelessness, and violence committed by and upon young people. All of these views are true of some young people, some of the time. The diversity of images indicates how difficult it is to pin down 'young people' as a single group.

Age as a marker of youth is itself subject to increasing flexibility. In our study we were primarily interested in young people in their late teens and early twenties. But if youth is regarded as a period of transition between dependent childhood and independent adulthood then, due to changes in social structures and attitudes, a person can be described as 'young' right up to their thirties. Traditional markers of adulthood such as entering the labour market, establishing a settled partnership or marriage, having children and setting up a home, are generally occurring later in life than they were 20 or 30 years ago. At the lower end of the age range, the 'tweenage' group (10- to 13-year-olds) seems to have much in common with older teens in terms of consumer interest and spending power. Young people can therefore be anything from 11 to 30 years old.

Given such social diversity, how can we talk about young people as a coherent social group? It is here that we find the idea of generations particularly helpful. Generations can be understood in a number of ways, but here we draw on Karl Mannheim's view that a 'generation' refers to a group of people who experience and respond to specific socio-historical conditions in common ways, depending in part on age. In other words, people growing up, living through and responding to particular historical events, political structures, dominant ideologies and technical developments together form a generation with a shared world view that distinguishes them from other generations. For Mannheim, it is the events, ideas and experiences encountered by young people between the ages of 17 to 25 that particularly shape their generation. Writers differ in terms of the labels and birth year boundaries they apply to particular generations, but they are usually periods of about 20 years. For the twentieth century, Hilborn and Bird use the names and characteristics below.

•    The World War Generation (also known as the GI Generation in the United States - born 1901-24). This generation's self-understanding and view of the world was shaped by their experience of two world wars separated by a period of economic depression and reconstruction. It has been argued that the World War Generation was characterized by confidence, having witnessed advances in science, medicine and technology, but it was also essentially a conformist generation where young people joined movements such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides and traditional patterns of social order were preferred. Prominent ideologies for the World War Generation were 'modernism, scientific progressivism, Marxism, socialism, Freudianism, existentialism and capitalism.

•    Builder Generation (also known as the Silent Generation - born 1925-45). Builders had much in common with their parents and in many ways consolidated their achievements and continued building the future after World War II. It has been suggested that builders tended towards conservative tastes, but at the same time they were also the first generation to have a recognizable 'teen age', marked by the development of a youth market in the 1950s based on music, fashion and entertainment - a market that has grown into the popular arts and culture we are interested in today, and a market which has helped define 'youth' as a concept ever since. Post-war affluence was key to this development of youth consumerism. It enabled the rapid expansion of the popular music industry, the invention of 'teenpics' in cinemas and the development of youth-orientated television. Like the generation before, the prominent ideologies for the Builder Generation were 'modernism, scientific progressivism, Marxism, socialism, Freudianism, existentialism and capitalism.'

•    Boomer Generation (so called because the birth rate increased after World War II creating a 'baby boom' - born 1946-63). Boomers are usually characterized by the counter-culture of the 1960s. Disillusioned with traditional institutions and authorities (including the Church), young Boomers began to look for new, authentic ways of living. Their focus was on the immediacy of experiences, and the values of freedom, self-realization and autonomy. They were a liberal, idealistic and optimistic generation; politically active, looking forward to a future of peace, love and prosperity without the constraints society imposed on their parents. They were the first young people to have access to the contraceptive pill, and (the middle class at least) to benefit from the expansion of higher education. Later they would also make use of the relaxation of the divorce laws in the 1960s. It has been observed that the Boomers were the first to be generationally conscious and aware of a gap between their values and ways of living compared to that of their parents. This generation gap was primarily expressed through popular music. Prominent ideologies for the Boomer Generation included 'modernism, scientific progressivism, Marxism, socialism, secularism, free-market capitalism, free expression, individualism, and 'DIY' spirituality.

•    Generation X (sometimes called the Buster Generation because there was a small dip in the birth rate after the Boomers - born 1964-81). Generation X picked up the legacy of the Boomers and in some ways paid the price of their experimentation with the counter-culture. Generation X were the latchkey kids who saw the divorce rate rise among their parents and the AIDS epidemic spread among their peers. Generation X also grew up through an economic recession where unemployment was a reality faced by many young people. Consequently, Generation X lost much of the optimistic idealism of the Boomers and instead developed a more pragmatic approach to life. Popular art and culture has been a central factor in Generation X's life, and advances in information and communications technology has contributed to the postmodern outlook that we are increasingly familiar that today. Prominent ideologies of Generation X include 'postmodernism, free-market capitalism, consumerism, pluralism, tolerance, individualism, spiritual eclecticism and introversion, New Age, eco-awareness, communitarianism, globalism.'

This takes us to Generation Y, today's young people and the subject of this book:

•    Generation Y (also known as the Millenial Generation - born 1982 onwards). Generation Y has grown up in a globalized society where many of the limitations of time and space have been overcome by further advances in information and communications technology. In this respect Generation Y is a technological generation that takes computers, emailing, text messaging and the Internet for granted. This is particularly interesting from our point of view since the digital revolution has enabled further expansion and diversification of popular culture. A young person living in Britain today can access hip hop in South Africa and a young person in India enjoy the latest American soap operas. Cultures from across the world are fragmented, appropriated and reinterpreted in other contexts to form new hybrid cultures - a process some theorists have called 'glocalization', meaning the 'global production of the local and the localization of the global.' Under these circumstances there is a growing potential for cultural homogenization at a global level but also, conversely, the defence and re-entrenchment of traditional cultural identities at the local level. The events of 11 September 2001 emphasize the potential of the latter.

As well as creating new cultural resources, globalization and technology have altered the labour market for Generation Y young people in Britain. Manual, unskilled work which supported many working-class young people in previous generations has declined or been outsourced to other parts of the world. Young people are therefore encouraged to stay on in further and higher education to equip themselves for an economy that requires a skilled and flexible labour force. Consequently the numbers of young people who continue with post-compulsory education in Britain has increased over the last ten years, while those who choose to leave school at 16 often end up unemployed or in unstable jobs within the service industries.

But young people's outlook on life does not appear to be bleak. Studies indicate that many young people accept the uncertainties of employment. Indeed, they positively embrace them and say they would find a job for life boring. In this respect Generation Y appears to be quite a self-reliant, confident and upbeat generation. They also seem to be tolerant and community minded, a generation of young people who value their family and friends, and on the whole intend to marry and have a family of their own. Indeed, Generation Y appears to be quite traditional and conservative  in a number of core areas of life, as we shall see later in our own exploration of Generation Y's world view.

We hope it is clear from the above, that the idea of generations is a helpful way of mapping young people in society. However, as already mentioned, young people are not all the same, and within generations we can expect young people to understand and experience their society differently according to background and demographic characteristics such as gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on. With this in mind we found it appropriate to think in terms of generational units - subgroups within the wider generation. Thus, while a 16-year-old White working-class boy and an 18-year-old middle-class Asian girl might share some ideas in common by virtue of the fact that they have been subject to the same socio-historical period, and may even have lived as part of the same school community or neighbourhood, their outlook on life is likely to be different because they come from different subgroups within the generation.

In our study of Generation Y, our focus was on a particular unit within the generation: 'socially included', mainly White, young men and women. These young people have enough money to consume and participate in popular arts and culture; they have some connection with mainstream institutions such as youth clubs, colleges and universities. We believe these 'included' young people provide a good barometer of wider society, although youth research has sometimes neglected them in favour of the more marginal, excluded and problematic young people.

Graham Cray is the Bishop of Maidstone and chaired the working group which produced Mission-shaped Church (CHP, 2004).
Sylvia Collins-Mayo is a sociologist of religion and a lecturer at Kingston University.
Bob Mayo is vicar of a parish in west London and is a former director of the Centre for Youth Ministry at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.
Sara Savage is a psychologist of religion and Senior Research Associate, Psychology and Christianity Project, Cambridge University.

© 2006 Church House Publishing
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