Generations Z in Europe by Scholz Christian;Rennig Anne;

Author:Scholz, Christian;Rennig, Anne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2019-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Images found to represent these ideas often take salience away from this generation, at times banalising or even infantilising its features. This is also reflected in the production of so-called ‘grey literature’. This may be thought to include a vast array of texts, including, for example, graphic novels such as La Generazione (Biondi, 2015), where the idea of Generation Z emerging is one that constructs them as the “result” of a crisis of family cohesion, and as a generation that has lost control of itself through the abuse of social media and alcohol/drugs (see, for instance, Scarpelli’s Mi piace, 2018). As in the case of this book, this material often has a captivating title that further suggests a connection with the universe of social media.

Therefore, it is pivotal for us to investigate the societal background that these are in principle referred to. How are political concerns reflected in these representations? Are they reflected in the first place, and to what extent? Is the representation of Generation Z as only devoted to consumption something diverging from the groups that are targeted by policy? It is in this sense that even if the representation material was not analysed in depth for this chapter, we propose keeping it as a point of reference to constitute the backdrop against which we want to discuss statistical data on Generation Z in Italy. This latter work will offer, we hope, some preliminary food for thought in understanding why these representations are so remarkably different from the concerns that are discursively constructed in the public sphere.

While we cannot hope to aim to be exhaustive in describing the features of Generation Z in Italy, we base our chapter on a reading of national statistics (ISTAT, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica) and we also reflect on data available from the Toniolo database, in order to compare and contrast these features, and provide some basic recommendations in order to capture their identity. We thereby profit from the work of the Giuseppe Toniolo Institute of Higher Education promoting since 2011 the project called “Youth Report”, which aims to provide a comprehensive and detailed source of information on the new Italian generations and their connections with the transformations taking place in the society in which they live (see http://www.rapportogiovani.it/osservatorio/). It should also be added that it is on this database that the book Generazione Z. Guardare il mondo con fiducia e speranza (Alfieri, Bignardi, & Marta, 2018), the only one we could find devoted to Generation Z in Italy, is based.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.