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Social Change and Generation

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Youth and the New Adulthood

Part of the book series: Perspectives on Children and Young People ((PCYP,volume 8))

Abstract

One of the tasks of youth studies is to understand change and how it impacts on young lives. Higher education participation has expanded rapidly and a new wave of global youth culture and profound shifts in the types and quantity of work available to young people have emerged. Young lives still differ, often profoundly from each other, around the world and within particular settings, but changes in the experience of youth are linked to globalisation and new transnational neo-liberal youth transition-regimes that have effects on all young people. Hence, the lives of young people tend to look profoundly different to their parents’ lives at the same age. The potential to investigate these changes in society and how they are linked to important continuities, is one of the promises of youth studies. Many scholars come to youth research to explore the intersection of social change and the biography, asking how youth and adulthood are being remade in contemporary conditions, and with what consequences for individual lives and the structures of inequality. The Life Patterns study has facilitated a rethinking of the relationship between change and inequality, adding nuance to debates that too often frame inequality as evidence of reproduction, conflating ‘continuity’ and inequality. This type of framing can be misleading. The longitudinal study of the participants in the Life Patterns research program shows that inequalities—including by class and gender—are being reshaped in contemporary conditions; patterns of inequality are intertwined with processes of change. A sociology of generations framework can highlight the way that inequalities are remade in the context of change.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These figures were created for me by Dr. Jenny Chesters and Dr. Jun Yu.

  2. 2.

    For course debates about these key concepts have far from ended in these important areas of sociological thinking!

  3. 3.

    I have traced out details of the sociology of generations elsewhere, particularly Woodman (2011, 2016) and Woodman and Wyn (2015).

  4. 4.

    Mills (1959: 6) saw the ‘intricate and subtle’ thought of Mannheim as one of the prime examples of the sociological imagination.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Dan Woodman

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  1. Dan Woodman
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Correspondence to Dan Woodman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Johanna Wyn

  2. Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Helen Cahill

  3. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Dan Woodman

  4. Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Hernán Cuervo

  5. Department of Sociology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Carmen Leccardi

  6. Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Jenny Chesters

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Woodman, D. (2020). Social Change and Generation. In: Wyn, J., Cahill, H., Woodman, D., Cuervo, H., Leccardi, C., Chesters, J. (eds) Youth and the New Adulthood. Perspectives on Children and Young People, vol 8. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3365-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3365-5_3

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-3365-5

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