Generation, Youth and Social Change in Australia

This article takes recent critiques of the conceptualisation of ‘youth as transition’ and explores the extent to which ‘generation’ offers a more effective way of conceptualising youth. There is an identifiable convergence of evidence for a ‘post-1970’ generation who have shaped a ‘new adulthood’. Yet current approaches inevitably identify education, work and family patterns of young people's lives as evidence of their faulty, failed transitions, measured against the standard of the previous generation. A focus on generation shifts the emphasis from the assumption of linear development in which youth is a phase towards adulthood, to locate young people within the political, economic and cultural processes that both frame and shape their generation, and the meaning and experience of ‘youth’ in distinctive and enduring ways. In addition to traditional measures of patterns of life, we argue that young people's subjectivities provide an insight into their active participation in and shaping of change processes, and to the nature and meaning of the post-1970 generation.