Beyond Mannheim: Conceptualising How People 全ee' and 船o' Generations in Contemporary Society

It is sometimes argued that generation has been hollowed out as a sociological concept outside the family context, yet it continues to feature prominently in policy debates, media discussion and everyday talk. The solidarity, conflict and ambivalence frameworks continue to be widely and usefully applied, but are unable to capture the complex ways in which we perceive and enact generation within and across the family and societal spheres. This paper seeks to develop a more grounded conceptual framework for both characterising and explaining the evolving notion of generation. We view generations as dynamic and varied reflections of how people relate to family members, their own cohort, and groups in wider society. The paper draws on qualitative primary data collected in the course of several recent projects pertaining to intergenerational relationships and the life course; it also draws on learning from the application of this data with final-year undergraduate sociology students who were engaged as an interpretive community to examine ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘doing’ generation.  Far from outdated, generation emerges as a still-relevant concept that encapsulates the meaning of generational family relations but also perceptions of how material resources, period effects and the welfare state context shape lives in contemporary societies.