Study area
2.1. Geological context
According to Bonvalet and Ogg (2011), the baby boom was first and foremost a demographic phenomenon, but it was clear from the beginning that it would have an impact on society. Likewise, Alwin, McCammon and Hofer (2006) note that society reflects, at any given time, the sum of its generations; where one set of cohorts is especially large – like the baby boomers – its lifestyle dominates society as it passes through the life course. The baby boomers, especially those born immediately after the Second World War, grew up during a period of economic upturn and the rise of the middle classes, despite the fact that their initial years of life were marked by scarcity. In their adolescence and young adulthood, dated in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s, they witnessed an era of social transformations. On the economic level, it was a period of development for new technologies such as television, refrigerators and records. The production of these consumer goods paved the way for a high degree of social mobility insofar as the new consumer society was open to large segments of the population (Edmunds & Turner 2002: 25).
For instance, the formative generational experiences of the British first-wave baby boomers have revolved around consumption as a major force shaping their identities and lifestyles (Leach et al. 2013: 4). The baby boomers are said to be the first generation of the age of affluence, in which they have had a greater access to lifestyle choices compared to their predecessors.
In the sphere of culture in the 1960s, young people had a pivotal role in shaping fashion and music, particularly rock music. The transmission and exchange of pop culture occurred globally through mass communication. The rise of a youth culture among the baby boomers then challenged the older customs in many fields, one of which was the institution of marriage. Bonvalet and Ogg (2011) argue that the percentage of births outside of marriage (or cohabitation outside of marriage) and the divorce rate are the two indicators in determining the disaffection among the boomers with marriage as an institution. Both indicators have increased sharply particularly in western and northern European countries since the mid-1960s, when baby boomers reached adulthood. According to the work by Willetts (2010) on the British baby boomers, a permissive society has since prevailed owing to an increase in abortion and divorce rates initiated by the boomers. The time period gave rise to a general trend toward greater individualism, led by the baby boomers, as well as a large change in social attitudes toward work and domestic life, which has affected everyone else too (Willetts 2010: 112, 114). Falkingham (1997) has further examined changing family relations among the baby boomers from multiple perspectives, such as marriage and partnership, patterns of family formation, divorce, single parenthood, remarriage and reconstituted families, and living alone in later life. The prediction is that more baby boomers will live outside a marital union in old age than in previous generations, and more will live alone as well.
The baby boomers in their youth were also characterised by direct or indirect involvement in political mobilisation. They came of age in a period of international turmoil represented by, among other things, decolonisation and the Vietnam War, which led to the formation of various anti-establishment movements, such as the New Left, the civil rights movement, the anti-war campaign, feminism, the nuclear disarmament peace movement and anti-colonialism (Edmunds & Turner 2002: 25). Using the United States as a point of reference, Willetts (2010: 121–122) claims that while the soldiers of the Second World War had fought on behalf of whole nations and united different generations, the boomers’ movements, which divided people by age and attitudes, were more destructive of social capital, aimed at opening up status quo institutions to greater diversity.
The social, cultural and political changes that the baby boomers experienced in their youth played a part in their constituting a distinctive generation. Generation in this context refers to the classic theory posited by Karl Mannheim in his essay ‘The Problem of Generations’ (1952/1928) – that is, the decisive factor in the formation of a generation is what happens in society during the formative years of the group concerned (Karisto 2007a: 94).
Mannheim (1952/1928) described the term generation as a group of people that shares a ‘similar location’ in social and historical circumstances in such a way that they are in a position to participate as an integrated group in certain common experiences that affect a similarly ‘stratified’ consciousness.
Participation in the common destiny of the same historical and cultural region
is, according to Mannheim’s argument, what constitutes a generation as an actuality (Mannheim 1952/1928: 303, emphasis in original). The articulation of generational experiences and a shared consciousness involves a number of competing groups that Mannheim called generational units. In further specifying the stratification of experiences and consciousness, he emphasised the importance of early formative influences that go on to form succeeding strata of experiences in later life. To put it plainly, a particular worldview acquired from experiences in youth has powerful lasting influences on the development of human consciousness and tendencies.
The concept of a generation defined by Mannheim obviously transcends that of a cohort. In an article entitled ‘Rethinking Generations’, Alwin and McCammon address the confusion of meanings and use of the word generation in social and behavioural sciences, highlighting three distinct notions: (1) generation as a location within the kinship structure of families, (2) generation as a birth cohort (or historical location) and (3) generation as historical participation in social movements and/or organisations (Alwin &
McCammon 2007). They argue that Mannheim’s use of the term generation in his path-breaking essay best fits the third concept, namely, generation as historical participation. Drawing on Mannheim’s theory, they define generations as groups of people sharing a distinctive subcultural identity by virtue of having experienced the same historical events in the same ways at approximately the same time in their lives (Alwin & McCammon 2007: 231).
Re-examining the notion of generation leads to the following distinction between the terms cohort and generation. While a cohort refers to the effects attributable to having been placed by one’s birth in a particular historical period, a generation is a joint interpretive construction that insists upon and is built among tangible cohorts in defining a style recognised from outside and from within (Alwin & McCammon 2007: 231; White 1992: 31). Furthermore, it is possible to distinguish between cohort and generation in relation to social changes. According to Roberts (2012: 480), changes experienced by succeeding cohorts are evolutionary, incremental or developmental, whereas changes involving new generations are transformative.
Consideration of the formulation of generations proposed by Edmunds and Turner (2002, 2005) further helps clarify how a cohort becomes a generation.
The mere temporal location of a cohort is not sufficient for the social processes that shape a generation, though a specific time may offer a variety of chances and resources to the members of the cohort. Rather, an age cohort comes to have social significance as a generation by constructing a distinctive cultural identity for itself (Edmunds & Turner 2002: 7; Edmunds & Turner 2005: 561).
As the argument by Edmunds and Turner (2002:7) shows, what makes
‘generation’ an interesting sociological category is the interaction between historical resources, contingent circumstances and social formation.
According to them, cultural identity, a decisive factor behind the emergence of a generation, is created to collectively respond to a traumatic event or catastrophe that unites a particular cohort of individuals into a self-conscious
age stratum (Edmunds & Turner 2002: 12). Traumatic events that shape generational consciousness include warfare, depression or radical social movements. A generation becomes a significant social force if the traumatic event is incorporated so as to structure a common habitus shared by its members.
As mentioned at the beginning of this section, the post-war baby boomers, or 1960s generation, grew up in a period of particular historical significance characterised by the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. Experiencing rapid technological advance, the development of a consumer society, the emergence of individualism, the expansion of popular culture and the formation of anti-establishment social movements have all helped to shape a particular cultural identity and habitus that are hostile to formal codes of behaviour (Edmunds & Turner 2002). When sharing this cultural identity and habitus among contemporaries in the 1960s, the baby boom generation emerged: a generation whose life was marked by change, challenge and transformation, and who broke the mould of the modern life course (Gilleard
& Higgs 2002: 376).
The foregoing theoretical consideration of generations and its relevance to the baby boomers rests mainly on discussions in western countries, especially those studies conducted in the context of the United Kingdom and the United States. The overlapping use of different terms, the post-war generation (Edmunds & Turner 2002), the baby boomers (Edmunds & Turner 2002;
Gilleard & Higgs 2002; Gilleard & Higgs 2007; Roberts 2012), the 1960s generation (Edmunds & Turner 2002; Edmunds & Turner 2005) and the mid-century generation (Gilleard & Higgs 2002), in the literature sometimes causes confusion and compels people to question just what precisely is the baby boom generation. The obscurity of the terminology might derive from the demographic features of the baby boom in the United Kingdom and the United States, in which the rising birth rate spanned almost 20 years. It can be argued, however, that what Edmunds and Turner (2002, 2005) acknowledge as a generation is a group of people comprised of the large boom cohorts who experienced in their youth the social transformation of the 1960s. This group, the so-called the 1960s generation, is further recognised as the first global generation because it had a common experience of and orientation toward traumatic political events, consumerism, global music and communication systems (Edmunds & Turner 2005: 566). According to Edmunds and Turner (2005: 565), traumatic events such as the Vietnam War mobilised protests not only in the United States and Europe, but generational movements likewise formed in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Nevertheless, the global generation is not homogeneous across nations and regions. Demographic variation among the baby boomers based on individual countries and specific socio-cultural attributes have had different influences on the boomers’ sociological meanings in the respective countries. In the next section, I focus on Japanese and Finnish baby boomers from a generational perspective to figure out how they present themselves as distinctive social groups.