Generational Stereotyping

It seems the latest rage in the business world is making generalizations about employees based on the generation to which they belong. Some businesses have hired consultants to explain these generational differences to their employees so that they can interact with each other more effectively. This, of course, is another variation on the “personality types.” The basic idea is still the same: condense all of human variation into a few discrete catagories in order to simplify human relationships.

I have complained to my employer about such a workshop in which I must participate. My concerns were countered with the assertion that “this is a science.” It may be a science, I was tempted to reply, but science is not infallible. In fact, the worst types of science in the last few centuries have been precisely those that elaborate and solidify catagorizations of human beings, whether it is based on race, gender, age, or any number of factors.

All categories are arbitrary. If I were born just a few years earlier, I would belong to a different generation, but there is no reason why the official “line” has to fall on that exact year. There are an infinite number of ways to create generational categories, and none is definitive. Furthermore, human variation is always continuous, not discrete. What this means is that the arbtirary categories will necessarily overlap to a significant extent. I am a Millenial, but my brother and many of my friends growing up were Gen Xers. Hence, the world I inhabited, the attitudes and views that I assimilated, were shared with people of an officially different generation. Yet, the whole basis of this new generational consulting fad is that generational differences are based on the entirely different environments in which people’s knowledge, attitudes, and values are shaped. But everyone on the boundaries – not just me – has grown up in an environment that includes people of two different generations. It’s not like in reality some big break occurs that would cause a neat, clean-cut generational divide.

People who are closer in age definitely have a larger shared cultural frame of reference, and their attitudes toward new technology will certainly dependent to some extent on how old they are (though even this generalization doesn’t entirely hold). Yet the concept of a “generation” doesn’t reflect that reality at all. For one thing, people on opposite ends of the range have far less in common with each other than they do with people on the other side of the generational divide. My experiences growing up were much closer to people born in 1980 than to those born in 2004. Nine-year-old children belong to the same generation as me! And I have a hard time relating to the world of college students!

The idea of a “generation” was originally employed in social science to describe specific groups of people at times of social upheaval - for example, the counterculture of the 1960s – in order to explain societal factors that caused a perceived rift with, and hence rebellion from, the established order. This is a far cry from suggesting that everyone fits into some sort of generational box.

I also take issue with the claim that generational groupings are at least as important as gender, race, class, etc. The latter groups relate to one’s objective place in the social division of labor and within relationships of power and dominance. To push these considerations to the background (as generational theory does) is, once again, to elide the role of power relations and the inherent dynamics of the capitalist system. The fact that, for example, generational theorists claim their framework explains Kondratieff cycles, without having any real understanding of economics, makes them all the more laughable and dismissable.

But the steady march of “progress” requires the contant elimination of complexity, as well as the management of human populations in terms of discrete categories. So, if it’s not generational stereotyping or personality stereotyping, it will be something else.