Oral History and Australian Generations by Katie Holmes Alistair Thomson

Author:Katie Holmes, Alistair Thomson [Katie Holmes, Alistair Thomson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367133627
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Interpreting social change and personal life

Recent developments in the historical sociology of family life have moved researchers’ focus from structures and processes of family formation, size of households and work life towards greater stress on emotional ties, patterns of domestic life and, in particular, the social formation of identity. American historian John Gillis has articulated clearly the historical shifts in nineteenth-century family life which accompanied capitalist industrialisation: household time, space and interactions became constructed in entirely new ways in light of the separation of work and home and the growing dominance of middle-class domestic ideology with its stress on family meals, festivals and so on.4 Similarly, Michael Gilding has demonstrated how the ‘modern’ Australian family household shrank, not only as family size declined in the twentieth century, but as boarders and wider kin were less commonly part of a household.5 Most important though has been the increasing significance given to psychological and emotional connections within families and their role in the construction of individual and collective identities, including those associated with ‘generations’. Not only groups such as sexual or ethnic minorities but also women, young people and the aged have increasingly claimed a ‘voice’ in social and public life, a development seen as reflecting the changes associated with late modern society.

Central to theoretical debates on such changes is the ‘individualisation’ thesis advanced by German sociologist Ulrich Beck. Beck and others have argued that a significant shift during the twentieth century has been the ‘disembedding’ of individuals from kin and community.6 The ‘normal biography’ or normative life stages of the ‘first’ or industrial modernity—a time in which transition to adulthood entailed a predictable trade or career, marriage and parenthood—has become less common. Individuals find themselves instead having to actively carve out what Anthony Giddens terms a ‘reflexive project of self’, that is, an identity suited to the fluidity and rapid change characteristic of the ‘second’ or late modernity.7 Global forces of economic, political and social change associated with the so-called ‘risk society’ have produced what Beck and Beck-Gernsheim analyse as a ‘do-it-yourself biography’, or even a ‘choice’ or ‘elective’ biography’—one that entails reflexive responses to changing circumstances. Beck and others also emphasise that such self-conscious processes of identity construction are linked to declining salience of family relationships based on social norms and practical needs; as this traditional ‘family’ increasingly becomes an empty or ‘zombie’ category, more fluid forms of relational rather than practical intimacy have become heightened.8

Others, however, contest these arguments as an oversimplification of historical, interpersonal and psychological processes.9 In sociology, research into intergenerational relations points to the methodological and conceptual complexity of the field, and in youth studies, debates continue over the salience of Beck’s arguments concerning cultural changes such as those associated with new technologies, mobility and more fluid identities.10 France and Roberts for example reiterate the salience of class structures, while Woodman and Wyn argue for deepening analysis through building upon Mannheim’s earlier formation of ‘the problem of generations’ and their various cohorts.11 Rather than seeing generation

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