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Tommi Hoikkala, Semi Purhonen and J.P.Roos University of Helsinki
The baby boomers, life’s turning points and generational
consciousness
Paper prepared for the Workshop on ‘Narrative, Generational Consciousness and Politics’, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge, Friday 30th June, 2000 Comments to j.p.roos@helsinki.fi
Finnish generations and baby boomers
Changes of the Finnish society during 20th century has often been analysed
with the help the concept of generation. The typology developed by
J.P. Roos (1987) based on Finnish autobiographies will be used here as
it is in general use in Finland. There are four generations: (1) those
born in 1900 – 1925: the generation of war and want, (2) those born in
1925 – 1939: the generation of reconstruction, (3) those born in 1940 –
1950: the generation of the transformation, and (4) those born during the
50’s: the suburban generation of. The typology was based on a collection
of autobiographies with the emphasis of such “variables” as social
and economic security, work, education and human relations .
The life course and turning points
Take the chain of generations and think of the children/parents-axis:
in this respect the post war period has brought many significant changes
concerning the gender system, structures in families, models of parenting
and practices of authorities (in general): one must only compare the scenery
of socialisation of baby boomers, to their children not to talk about their
own parents. And you find changes. Which leads to a more general discussion
of life as a process (Featherstone 1994; Turner 1994). In very schematic
terms the life course in modern societies has had a linear and rigid nature
(Featherstone 1994, 71): various age grades were highly standardised and
universalised, so that the life course was constructed as a universal and
institutional trajectory led from childhood through youth towards the middle-age
of adulthood with an ending in the rest as a retired wage labourer. The
late modern condition is said to transform many aspects of those
old conventions: late modernity entails (or is said to entail) a reversal,
a great diversity in the cultural content of life phases and a blurring
of age grades, individuality instead of standardisation, variation and
flexibility in the trajectories of life. In sum, one must talk about life
courses in the plural, about differences, and about disorders in the life
course.
The interpretation of a late modern life course offers a conflicting perspective on developmental psychology and on the psychology of life cycles, both of which have strong universalistic hypotheses concerning the trajectory of life. Think about the baby boomers in this respect: what is peculiar and special to them? Can we find unconventional routes and paths through life (divorces and remarriages, people sticking to second choices, fragmented work careers, alternative trajectories)? or is it more probable that breaks in the linear model of life are not going to occur before the children of the post-war generations are launched on their trajectories of life. Here the discussion of the shift from normal biography to choice biography, or self made-biography (die Bastelbiographie), or to reflexive biography in life narratives (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1994, 13; Giddens 1991, 7-8) would be relevant. Or are those discourses mere theoretical imagination, which has not so much to do with turning points as lived experiences? Data The quantitative data comes from a mail questionnaire (The Finnish life
course) carried out by Statistics Finland in 1998. The questionnaire covers
general background information plus themes like: (1) education, (2) work
and income, (3) the family in childhood and parents, (4) present family
and household, (5) orientations in work and retirement, (6) health and
life satisfaction, (7) generational consciousness, (8) partner- and human
relations, (9) way of life and life orientations and (10) turning points
in life.
The concept of turning points What do we best remember of our lives? One answer is the turning points in life, the moments which imply a change in our life course. Only the first one, birth (especially the fateful moment when we start breathing), nobody can remember (except, it is claimed, after a long analysis) but most of us will have heard quite detailed stories about it. The rest is mostly known to us: entering school, illnessess, accidents, marriage(s), divorce(s), (parents’ and own), graduation, changes of employment, of homes, of places of living, children’s birth and later events etc. Of course, many such events do not necessairly constitute turning points
properly speaking, i.e. events when our life takes another course. In a
person’s life story (i.e. life as told), turning points are typically very
much present. They form the anchors or organizing events around which the
life story is structured. They are the events that are mentioned in the
story, that form the starting points of new chapters etc. If a child’s
birth does not constitute a turning point, it is simply not mentioned.
Of course there is also the possibility that a turning point is not consciously
seen as such. At least when it takes place. But if it really is a
turning point, its impact will certainly be noticed. In fact, in many cases
we will later search for the precise moment when an important change was
introduced in our lives. When did we fall in love? When did the relationship
turn sour? When did we first notice that something was taking place in
our relationship to work? When did we notice that a certain career
was the right one? Or the wrong one? All these questions will usually be
answered in at least a temporarily satisfactory manner, even though it
is not always certain that the timing is right.
Note that turning points are a different thing from “turning periods”. The clearest example is the difference between getting sacked and being afterwards unemployed during a longer period. But of course gettting happily married and having either a happy or an unhappy marriage is another. In the latter case, the nature of the turning point depends a lot of the nature of the marriage. But in most cases the actual marriage is seen as positive regardless of the consequence . Another possible alternative for “turning point” is simply “important life event”. Turning points may require more uncertain intepretation whereas a life event is more easily recognizable and less prone for misinterpration. But on the other hand, a turning point is more demanding and homogeneous: not everything that is classified as an important life event means that it will turn the course of our lives. But a turning point is always also an important life event. In Inglehart and Baker (2000), Finland belongs clearly to the group of countries with high self-expression and secular-rational values. Also, Finland has changed very little from 81 to 96 . That is, Finns are in general very highly modernised (compared to UK, for instance!). But from our perspective, the most important thing is that Finns live in a largely unchanging value environment, where important turning points do not come from dramatic outside events or threats to life and neither do they believe in transcendental, mystic events. In the former socialist countries, the changes in the surrounding society have forced people to emphasize survival-values, which also implies that these changes would be mentioned as negative turning points in life. In this paper we will discuss turning points from a different perspective. The discussion will be based on an open ended survey question to the three generations discussed above. The question was formulated as follows: Have there been situations in your life which you have experienced as turning points? So the emphasis was on lived experience. It might be of interest to mention that roughly 15-20 % the respondents had not experienced any turning points, with the exception of young women, who usually had had turning points.After this we asked whether these turning points were changes to the better or worse or to both and received a not very astonishing result that most of the people had experienced turning points to both better and for worse. Still, it is fascinating that the youngest generation has had clearly most positive turning points and least negative ones, but even there the mixed turning points dominate. (Table 1; for tables and figures click here) How should one interpret a result that around 40 % of the youngest generation have experienced ONLY positive turning points whereas only 3-5 % have had only negative turning points (which are most common for the oldest generation of women, over 10 % who cannot remember ANY positive turning points at all!). It is interesting that the survey makes it possible to lend credence to both the conception that we are prone to forget the negative things in our lives as well as positive. And at least it can be said that a very important and often negative turning point, entering school, is not mentioned at all. Education and gender are very important in how the different types of turning points are affected. Interestingly enough, also marital status has a role. Depending of the education, the lower the education the more ofthen the turning points were negative OR interestingly, there were no turning points! And conversely, the higher one’s education, the more does life consist of only positive turning points or of both negative and positive (Table 2) Marital status is highly relevant. To be unmarried or divorced/widowed gives most negative turning points, and to be unmarried means also that one has more often no turning points at all. While widowers or dicorced very seldom have no turning points in life. But first something about the typical turning points mentioned in the
open question. We also asked about the degree of importance so that
we have several turning points organized according to their importance.
(Typically three positive and two negative turning points were mentioned).
In order of importance marriage, falling in love etc. comes first, the most often mentioned second turning point was related to children and the most often mentioned third turning point was related to work and studies. Housing comes close as third mentioned turning point. Gender differences are not too unexpected: women mentioned child related
turning points almost twice as often than men, men mentioned work or studies
more often than women, but the difference is not dramatic (only 6 percentage
points). Marriage related turning points were mentioned more often by men,
again with a 6 percentage points difference. Housing is mentioned
as equally important (Table 4).
Generational differences are as such relatively unimportant. But there are some interesting results: if actual biological generations are compared (those born in 45-50 and their “children” born in 65-70), the baby boomers emphasize pair relationships whereas their children see work and study related turning points as more important.On the other hand, baby boomers are more work-oriented than those born in 1951-56. Education (Table 5) is on the other hand clearly related: those with college education saw pair relations clearly less often as positive turning point,and children dramatically less often (24 % vs 9 %!) Work and studies were conversely seen as most mportant positive turning points (47 to 16). The “disappearance” of children is quite astonishing, as the number of children or age should not contribute to this. In any case it does not reflect very positively upon the relationship of education and parenting. People living in the countryside emphasized couple relations and children, whereas city people saw work and studies as positive turning points. Housing was also clearly related to the rural-urban division: being more important in the cities (Table 5) Negative turning points were quite different from the positive
ones. The only turning point which could have both meanings was divorce,
which was sometimes mentioned as a positive turning point but was also
the most important negative turning point together with death of relatives,
and economic or employment problems. Interestingly, there is no mention
of chldren as a negative turning point (neither are drug problems or crime
mentioned at all). Economic problems dominated already as second
and especially as third most important turning points. (Table 6)
If we look at them by generation we get some obvious results. Illness is more important for the old than for the young, but economic problems are more important for the male baby boomers, followed closely by the young generation (both men and women, women being slightly higher). Death of a close person was most important for older women (and for women in general!, Table 7). What was perhaps more unexpected is that divorce is the most important negative turning point for young men! Gender differences are here important, whereas education does not make much of a difference. So education does not affect the experience of economic problems as a turning point. Women experience deaths of close persons as much more important than men and men conversely experience economic problems as much more important than. Although class position was not significant for the whole population, in the baby boomers’ generation we get quite interesting results. The upper white collar men of the baby boomers have the highest frequence of economic problems as a negative turning point thereas the upper white collar women peak the divorce category. This does not apply to other generations, where the relationship is inverse or does not exist. (Table 8, Fig 1 & 2) In other words, the higher one’s class position ( in the baby boomer
generation), the clearer modern risks threaten. This is very problematic.
One explanation would be that a higher class position entails more sensitivity
to economic risks and more willingness to change. The increased
divorce risk for women again tells of more equality between spouses in
the upper class.
When do the turning points happen?
The most important discovery of the paper is that
the timing of turning points is both dependent of the nature of the turning
point and generation in a very interesting way. The main finding
is that the positive turning point is highly dependent on generation, whereas
the negative turning point is not. On the other hand, genders do not show
much difference.
But of course this is a strange result: why should the most important turning point in one’s life be also the first? What do people understand with “turning points”? Perhaps we should only have used the less demanding word “life event”? Incidentally, in Roos (1987 ) it was claimed that the life stories in a sense “ended” when people were between 30 and 40, i.e. after that their lives did not seem to contain much that would have been worth writing about. Here this result is confirmed resoundingly, insofar as positive life events are concerned. If divided between the most important categories, there is about a 10
year difference between the peaks of marriage as a turning point and housing
as a turning point (the two extremes: otherwise the order was marriage/relationship,
work/study, children). The third most inportant turning point usually
takes place at a recent point of time, i.e. in the 90's.
As to the negative turning points, the situation is completely
different (see Fig 7) For all generations, the most important negative
turning point takes place in the early 90's and only in the oldest generations
does there exist another small peak in the early 60's (at a time which
is known in the literature as “the great migration”). In other words,
there is no relationship to age or generation as to the timing of the turning
points. For men the turning points have an even higher concentration than
for women, 10 % of all negative turning points have taken place in 1991
in the baby boomer generation (Fig 8). This is mainly explained by the
role of negative economic turning points, but even other major negative
points are concentrated in the near past, although in a less dramatic fashion
(divorce, death and illness, Fig 9).
In any case, there is nothing specifically generational here, unless
we speculate that different generations have experienced the crisis differently
(but negatively). This kind of speculation is only of non-academic interest.
Subjective generations Finally, we shall discuss the turning points and subjective generations.
In addition to the “objective” generation we also asked people whether
they saw themselves as belonging to a generation. Here, the baby boomers
were much more prone to see themselves subjectively as a generation,
and precisely as a baby boomer generation (much fewer classified themselves
as belonging to the “generation of the sixties”) (Fig 10).
In the above discussion, we have used only “objective” generations, i.e. generations based on common birthdates. But we also asked the respondents about whether they saw themselves as members of a generation. Interestingly 60% of all respondents and 80 % of the baby boomers answered in the affirmative (so that the youngest age group was least keen on belonging to a generation). As to the actual named generations (suggested in the questionnaire), they partially overlap with the objective generations, but not completely. So the oldest generation called itself most often the postwar generation whereas most of the baby boomers were either baby boomers or the 60's generation. The youngest generation was most uncertain: it saw itself as part of the 60's generation, baby boomers (an interesting echo effect which should be studied more), but the most popular name was the welfare generation. “Lucky generation” was also chosen by some. Other suggested names (x-generation, ecological generation etc.) were extremely rare. The most problematic turned out to be the 60's generation which was most popular among the young generation and therefore must mean that they took it as a reference to their birthdate. If we look specifically at turning points and subjective generations
(Table 11) even though the results are quite blurred, some (few)
interesting differences emerge. Thus the postwar generation and the baby
boomers were almost identical in experiencing least positive turning points
whereas the “welfare generation” and those who did not belong to any generation
were more positive. The subjective baby boomers emphasized work the least
as an important turning point. The “welfare generation” had experienced
the economic crisis most negatively. When looking at those born 45-50 only,
the results do not change much.
Consequences for the theory of generations
One very important conclusion which can be drawn immediately from this difference between positive and negative events is that only positive events function as a basis for generational experience. A negative effect, such as economic shock or negative social or cultural change will not become a generational experience (because there is not relationship to age) whereas a change experienced as positive will become a generational experience. Unfortunately, this result is not conclusive, as no such positive cultural changes were mentioned by our respondents. In fact, generation-related changes were highly individual in nature, much more so than the negative changes. More research is therefore needed. Also, as mentioned above, it is possible that not all age cohorts become
generations and that in this sense the negative turning points may also
be generational. But considering that these experiences fall on very few
points of time and also that the most recent negative point does not seem
to have created any generation, this seems to be quite improbable
Another conclusion is that it is astonishing how strongly the Mannheimian idea of generations has permeated our thinking, especially as it seems to be impossible to get any kind of empirical confirmation for its correctness. In empirical terms, Mannheim assumes that a given experiential position with regard to important historical events gave rise to a generation. This one could call an experience-generation. Most of the culturally and socially constructed generations (such as the generation of 60's) are certainly Mannheimian, but the problem is that they are highly specific and tend to “reproduce” themselves. A discourse about babyboomers helps create a common generational experience and so more and more babyboomers will begin “sharing” common experiences. An argument against the Mannheimian generations is evident from this paper: when asked, people do not spontaneously describe as important experiences - turning points - anything that could be even remotely called Mannheimian. On the contrary, the important experiences are highly private and personal events or turning points in one’s life. And which is also very important, they must be positive to qualify as generational events.. So it might be claimed that instead of experience-generations,
we actually have event-generations, i.e. generations constituted around
similar events at similar points of life. And another possibility
that we can test with our data is whether we have value-generations, i.e.
generations with common values. But this falls outside the scope
of our paper.
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