In sociology, the concept of “generation” is usually applied to a wide variety of social categories. This is a cohort of peers, and a cohort of several years of birth — as in studies of social mobility, as well as a community of those who share acceptable values, simultaneously experienced significant events, is a bearer of similar experiences and memories. Theoretical reflection in modern literature continues to excite the fundamental essay of K. Mannheim “The Problem of Generations”. The cognitive intuitions it contains have a priority status, but the published reviews state that the empirical potential of the concept outlined there is minimal, and new times require new approaches to analyzing the role of generations in the intensification of social dynamics and the movement of history.
Sociology of the social structure of a generation is mainly a way of observing, fixing and describing the transformations of the morphological structure of a community. The heterogeneity of the age cohort is prescribed by origin from different types of families and birth in a particular region and type of settlement. In the course of primary socialization, general patterns of worldview and worldview are formed, an attitude to the past, present and future on the basis of internalized values, standards and norms of behavior. The degree of stratification of life chances and opportunities given by birth is subsequently corrected or fixed by institutions of secondary and higher education, which is monitored in studies of professional and status mobility. Events are capable of elevating an age cohort to the status of a generation, constructing an identity (“we,” shared ways of feeling, thinking, acting) and, almost synchronously, differentiating peers, establishing differences and distances.
: Colour and Culture in South Africa: A Study of the Status of the Cape Coloured People within the Social Structure of the Union of South Africa . Sheila Patterson.
