Generation, youth and social change in Australia

Abstract

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 cult..