Childhood and Intergenerationality:Toward an Intergenerational Perspectiveon Child Well-Being

5

Leena Alanen

5.1 Introduction

Research on well-being (alternatively welfare) has in recent years grown with the

well-being of children emerging in tandem as a key topic. This handbook in itself

is a clear indication of the recognition of a focus on children in well-being

research as being both justifiable and timely. However, research communities

have by no means been the first to raise this topic on the agenda. Instead, those

child advocacy agencies worldwide (such as UNICEF) and childrens rights

initiatives, which have increasingly based their activities on the UN Convention

of the Rights of the Child, have been the leaders in producing and distributing

information on the state of childhood in the world and in individual countries.

Over the years, initiatives have also been taken to establish both national and

cross-national systems of statistical indicators for measuring childrens well-

being. However, this has been mostly for the purpose of informing and guiding

policy-making, of testing the performance of policies and, more recently, of

providing reliable data for social reporting on childrens societal status and the

conditions of their lives.

In each of these projects, the meaning of child well-being is given an answer in

one form or another, however implicit that answer may be, and in many cases rests

on publicly accepted and assumed truths on the subject. In the world of policy-

making, this is perhaps only to be expected, as the rationalities of policy-making

and of science tend not to coincide (cf. Hudson and Lowe 2004), and the theoretical

foundation of the assumed understandings of well-being takes a second place to the

more immediate aims of developing common protocols and consistent, shared

measures and summary indices of childrens well-being (cf. Hauser et al. 1997;

Gasper 2004; Manderson 2005). In academic research, and in order to gain valid

L. Alanen

Department of Education, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finlande-mail: leena.m.alanen@jyu.fi

A. Ben-Arieh et al. (eds.), Handbook of Child Well-Being,DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9063-8_5,# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

131

knowledge on child well-being, the question of how researchers conceptualize the

object of their work is naturally paramount.

A broad agreement among scholars of well-being continues to be that definitions

of well-being are both variable and often conceptually confused; the field is in need

of conceptual clarification. A useful distinction for rethinking concepts of well-

being is made by Ruth Lister (2004) in her critical reading of poverty research and

the way its central notion of poverty (which often figures as one of the dimensions

of childrens well-being) tends to be handled. Lister contends that across the

relevant research literature, the same term used in different ways which in turn

transfers to policy-making. She underlines that to understand the phenomenon of

poverty, it is important to differentiate between concepts, definitions, andmeasures (Lister 2004, pp. 38). Concepts operate at a fairly general level,and they provide the framework within which definitions (of concepts) andmeasurements (operationalizations of definitions) are then developed. Defini-tions (and therefore also measures) mediate concepts in the sense that explana-

tions of poverty and its distribution are in fact implicit in definitions of poverty.

For this reason, it is first important that definitions are not divorced from their

wider conceptualizations and, second, that their relationships to wider concep-

tual frameworks (which may be envisioned as networks of interrelated concepts)

are clarified. Only then, Lister surmises, definitions can function as an adequate

basis for developing measures. The problem in much poverty research, she

notes (2004, pp. 67), is that researchers typically begin their work with

definitions instead of concepts and then continue to develop measures, but

while doing this, they tend to mistake their definition for a concept or simply

conflate definitions and concepts. The result is that the conceptual frameworks

on which different understandings of poverty are actually founded are lost from

sight, not to mention from analysis; in addition, the historical and political

constructedness of the adopted notion of poverty is left unconsidered. Naturally,

this can have crucial implications for the politics of poverty as concepts never

stand outside history and culture; they are always contested and also have

practical effects.

It is hardly an overstatement to note that a similar situation prevails as regards

the notion of well-being and even more so as regards childrens well-being (see,

e.g., Clark and Gough 2005; Nussbaum 2005; McGillivray 2007; Morrow and

Mayall 2009; Camfield et al. 2010). While it might be in one sense true that

there has been a marked growth in studies on childhood well-being in recent

years (Fegter et al. 2010, p. 7), the volume of publishing in the field indicates

that the largest growth is taking place in the development of measurements and

indicators. In fact, a journal (Child Indicators Research) has been established,

beginning from 2008, to publish work in this field: The journal aims to focus on

measurements and indicators of childrens well-being, and their usage within

multiple domains and in diverse cultures. The Journal will present measures and

data resources, analysis of the data, exploration of theoretical issues, and informa-

tion about the status of children, as well as the implementation of this information in

132 L. Alanen

policy and practice. It explores how child indicators can be used to improve the

development and well-being of children. Generally, ideas and discourses of child

well-being are being constructed in widely different fields, including politics,

professional communities, and media and also academia. A proximity to

policy-making (often the result of availability of funding) may well also

limit possibilities for the research needed to complement the work done on the

measurement end of well-being studies, that is, research that aims to systematically

build up and consolidate theoretical frameworks within which particular notions of

childrens well-being would attain their conceptual power.

The study of well-being is bound to be a multidisciplinary research field, and

therefore, it is increasingly recognized that an adequate understanding of (child)

well-being will need to be interdisciplinary. This chapter aims to work toward such

a goal. It is specifically concerned with delineating the nature of child well-being as

a research object in the social sciences. Until recently, any understanding of

children and their well-being has often been based on psychological perspectives

that work with developmental notions of the individual child. The work presented in

this chapter challenges this hegemony of (mainly) psychological notions of children

and their well-being, by introducing some of the theoretical resources that have

been developed within the sociology of childhood or, more broadly, multidis-

ciplinary childhood studies (see also Jens Qvortrups chapter in this handbook;

Chap. 22, Sociology: Societal Structure, Development of Childhood, and theWell-Being of Children). The guiding vision is an understanding of children as

social beings which, once fully developed, would need to be integrated withcompatible notions originating in other disciplines (psychology, economics, biol-

ogy, neuroscience, etc.) to form an overarching framework that also works well in

the study of child well-being.

To ensure such theoretical compatibility, the set of contributions from partic-

ular disciplines would need to share some basic (philosophical, ontological,

epistemological) assumptions. Therefore, the starting point in this chapter is

a particular social ontology that helps to conceptualize childhood as

a fundamentally relational phenomenon. This relationality, moreover, impliesintergenerationality, in that children are constituted specifically as childrenprimarily (although not exclusively) within intergenerational relations, that is,

as a generational category of beings that is internally related to other existing

generational categories, especially adults (see below). Such an approach was

adopted early in the foundation phase of the sociology of childhood in the

1980s. While a relational sociology of childhood can be developed in more than

one direction, the specific ontology adopted in the present case gives a definite

direction in the exercise of constructing a coherent intergenerational frameworkfor researching childhood and childrens well-being. Arguably then, the frame-

work for an adequate study of children and childhood (and thus, by way of

derivation, childrens well-being) is necessarily intergenerational.In the next section, a brief description is given on the forms of undertaking

childhood sociology as they have developed so far.

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 133

5.2 Sociologies of Childhood

One of the strongly underlined assumptions in childhood studies is that children are

social actors and active participants that contribute to the everyday life of the

societies in which they live. Childrens long-lived invisibility in most social science

research is seen to be linked to various forms of developmental and socialization

thinking which have placed children within the processes of first becoming (and not

being) full social actors, adulthood being the assumed end point of childhood

development. The contrasting, foundational starting point given in the assumption

of childrens (social) agency implies for research that children are to be addressed

as the (sociological) equals to adults or any other social segments of individuals.

In sociology, this has been taken to imply that childhood is a structural conceptat the same analytical level as concepts such as class, gender, and race/ethnicity

(see Jens Qvortrups chapter in this handbook; Chap. 22, Sociology: SocietalStructure, Development of Childhood, and the Well-Being of Children).

Thus, sociologists approach childhood as a socially established and instituted

formation in its own right; it is a culturally, politically, and historically

constructed figuration of social relations which has been institutionalized

for the younger members of societies to inhabit. The relative permanence of such

a societal childhood, once it has been formed and established in a particular society,

justifies the idiom of a common, shared childhood, whereas childhoods

(in the plural) would refer to the social and cultural life worlds and experiences

of individual children within that particular social space of childhood the

phenomenology of childhood. Therefore, to assume that there exists one true,

universal, essential childhood is to succumb to a modernist fiction. The observation

that at some point of time and place a particular form of childhood is generally

considered normal, and tends to prescribe how children are expected to behave

and treated, merely confirms the degree of institutionalization and the socially

gained cultural autonomy of a particular childhood construct. What has been

constructed may also be transformed, and childhood certainly has been transformed,

as evidenced by historians of childhood (e.g., Hendrick 1997; Cox 1996).

While this understanding of childhood is broadly shared within the multidis-

ciplinary childhood studies, different disciplines and research fields, such as soci-

ology, anthropology, history, economics, and cultural studies, vary in the way

they characteristically emphasize and elaborate components of the shared view.

In the early stage of the emerging sociology of childhood, three distinct approaches

could be seen developing, in other words, three different ways of carrying

out childhood sociology within a broadly shared frame. In each of them,

particular discourses and ways of conceptualizing children and childhood have

been in use; moreover, the knowledge that is sought in the research also varies

between them.

(1) A (micro-)sociology of children approach grew out of an early critique ofchildrens invisibility in social science knowledge and the subsequent correction of

the then-existing research approach to include children. In the new studies, children

were placed in the center of sociological attention and studied in their own right,

134 L. Alanen

and not as appendices or attachments to parents, families, schools, or other institu-

tions (e.g., Qvortrup 1987; Alanen 1988; James and Prout 1990). The discrimina-

tion of children in scientific knowledge would end by researchers including

childrens views, experiences, activities, relationships, and knowledges in their

data, directly and firsthand. Children were to be seen as units of research and as

social actors and participants in the everyday social world. It is thus now understood

that through their co-participation, they also contribute to events in their worlds

(including research!) and, in the end, to the reproduction and transformation of the

same social world. Research of this strand has mostly been conducted in small-scale

studies, with a focus on childrens everyday life and their negotiations with other

actors in their immediate social and cultural worlds. The conceptual frameworks

that are used in the micro-sociology of children tend to originate in versions of

interactionist or ethnomethodological theories, and their philosophies of science in

versions of phenomenology or pragmatism. In terms of research methods, qualita-

tive methods in particular various modifications of ethnography and observational

methods have been preferred. (The guidelines given to the chapter authors of this

handbook fully recognize this form of sociological childhood knowledge: Authors

are reminded that the way to best understand childrens well-being includes recog-

nizing and respecting childrens own points of view; their opinions, perspectives,

and perceptions; and their evaluations and aspirations. The handbook editors also

wish to see child well-being being promoted as a people-centered concept

that makes reference to their lives both in the present as well as to their

(social, developmental) future. In accordance with this view, a comprehensive

concept of child well-being would cover both childrens well-being and their

well-becoming).

The second approach, (2) a deconstructive sociology of children and childhoods,which originated in the discussions and debates of the 1970s1980s social sciences,

brought new insights into how the social world is to be understood and studied.

The deconstructive approach considers notions such as child, children and

childhood, and their many derivations (including child well-being) to be histor-

ically formed cultural constructs. Therefore, the approach underlines the politicalnature of childhood constructs that the collective (including scientific) images of

children and childhood prevailing at any time and place and beliefs of and attitudes

toward children are, in the end, politically formed. As such, they have consequences

for childrens everyday reality, as images, beliefs, and attitudes have been incor-

porated in a range of models of action, cultural practices, and, for example, welfare

policies, thereby providing cultural scripts and rationales for people to understand

and to act in relation to, and on, children and childhood. Because of the political

significance of cultural constructs, the task of the deconstructive researcher is to

unpack such constructions. This is done by exposing their creators and the social

circumstances of their formation, as well as the political processes of their (re-)

production, interpretation, communication, and practical implementation. The aim

is to disclose the discursive power of cultural constructs in social life, in this case in

childrens everyday life and experiences. Foucault, Deleuze, and Donzelot are

important sources of theoretical inspiration for followers of this approach.

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 135

Useful methods for deconstruction include discourse analysis, conversation analy-

sis, and various other text analytical methods.

The third main form of sociological approaches to childhood is (3) the structuralapproach. Here, childhood is taken as the unit of analysis and may be understood asa social structure in itself. Structure, however, is a multi-meaning concept, and

there are a variety of ways to undertake structural analysis in sociology; what these

approaches share is a consideration given to entities and processes residing on the

macro level. The two main forms of structural thinking may be identified: The

structural-categorical approach is the first of them; it takes the view of children asa socially formed aggregate, perhaps a generation (Mannheim; see below). Far

less attention is paid to the actual living children, each with their different and

individually experienced childhoods, which are the primary focus in the micro-

sociology of children (see above). Instead, children are assembled under the

socially established category of children, and the aim of a structurally operatinganalysis is to arrive at a description of the childhood that is shared by all children in

that society (or any time/space) in question. Among sociologists of childhood,

Jens Qvortrup has strongly fostered this approach (see, e.g., Qvortrup 1993;

Qvortrup et al. 1994; and Qvortrups chapter in this handbook; Chap. 22,Sociology: Societal Structure, Development of Childhood, and the Well-Being

of Children). Empirical observations (measurements) of focal conditions of chil-

drens lives such as the patterns of their activities, experience of poverty or social

exclusion, use of time, or well-being are linked with macro-level influential

entities and processes (macro-variables). These may be understood to cause

or impact the social category of children as a whole, by powerfully forming

a common, shared, typical childhood through large-scale processes, in interplay

with other macro-variables and linked processes. The structural-categorical

approach is especially useful in studies that aim to contribute to social reporting

and monitoring, for example, a countrys child population, and provide possible

explanations for the condition of children. While the structural-categorical

approach is well suited to large and often comparative studies of child populations

using statistical methods, this is not a limitation. Qualitative methods or mixed

methods are additionally useful and may contribute to the big picture by

providing vivid and child-level information.

In contrast to the first structural-categorical approach, the second mode of

working structurally in the sociology of childhood is one that is grounded in a

relational social ontology. Due to its employment of relational insights in conceptu-

alizing childhood, this approach is usefully called a structural-relational approach.It is structural in that childhood is conceptualized as a position (or social space)

within an existing (socially generated) generational structure. Children are madeinto children (and members of a generational category) inasmuch as they come to

occupy that social space and practically engage themselves with the reproduction of

the (generational) relations that recurrently define them as children. This, then, is

where relationality comes in and a different, relational conceptualization of child-

hood begins to take shape. The primary focus in research with a relational approach

is on the generational practices, specifically the (relational) practices within which

136 L. Alanen

children co-construct themselves as children as occupiers of a particular genera-

tional position, in relation to a non-child category (or categories) of agents (see, e.g.,

Alanen 2001, 2009). The advantage in studying childrens issues relationally is

that it helps to produce a more dynamic analysis than the categorical approach.A second advantage is that not only can the outcomes of the enacted generationingprocesses be studied for features that children display representing the childhood

of the time-space or individual childhoods but also the actual processes and

relations within which those outcomes are produced. Therefore, the agency aspectin childrens activity comes into view more prominently than in the categorical

version of structural analysis, as children are understood to be the co-constructors of

their own objective and subjective, structured, and structuring conditions. The concept

of generation as a relational social structure is an analytical construct, and childhood

(childrens positionality) is in this approach one of the (relational) components, or

parts, of a generational structure. The concept of generational structure refers to

a macro-entity which, in interplay with other similar relationally constructed social

structures gender, ethnicity, class, (dis)ability, and so on produce the events that

can be observed and understood as facets of actual childhood(s).

5.3 A Relational Ontology

By introducing relational thinking in the case of children and childhood, this

chapter advocates a social ontology and a research program for the sociology of

childhood that is consistently relational.

The terms relational and relationality are not unambiguous; their meaning and

function vary across theoretical contexts. Furthermore, relational thinking is not new

to social science, and there are several relational approaches that are actively used

within social science research. (It can be traced back to some parts of Durkheim and to

Marx. Marx wrote in Die Grundrisse (in 18571861): Society does not consist ofindividuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individ-

uals find themselves (Marx 1993, p. 77)). For example, Mutzel and Fuhse (2010)give an account of one specific sort of relational approach the NewYork School

and claim that this school (together with its transatlantic bridge building) now

presents themost important and innovative theoretical approach in todays sociology.

This particular branch of relational analysis has been developed out of former

modes of network analysis through an engagement with the linguistic turn

(Mische 2011, pp. 28); social networks are conceptualized and analyzed as

sociocultural formations. Mustafa Emirbayer, working close to the New York

school, published in 1997 a Manifesto for a Relational Sociology which is one ofthe most quoted articles in relational theory circles and has been an inspiration in

debates on relational social theory, especially in the USA:

Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social

world as consisting primarily in substances or in processes, in static things or in dynamic,

unfolding relations. Large segments of the sociological community continue implicitly

or explicitly to prefer the former point of view. Rational-actor and norm-based

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 137

analyses diverse holisms and structuralisms, and statistical variable analyses all of

them beholden to the idea that it is entities that come first and relations among them only

subsequently. (Emirbayer 1997, p. 281)

Alongside network analysis, relational approaches have been promoted in

science and technology studies (e.g., Actor Network Theory), in systemic sociol-

ogy (e.g., Niklas Luhmann), and in the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias.

Relational sociology has also been thriving beyond the borders of Anglophone

social science: In Italy, Pierpaolo Donati has since the 1980s labored on his

sociologia relazionale. (An introduction to his sociology is his book that hasbeen newly published in English (Donati 2011). See also Margaret Archers

introduction to Donatis sociology: Archer (2010)). Germany (Fuhse and Mutzel2010) and France (Vautier 2008) can also boast research groups developing their

brands of relational sociology. The Canadian-based journal Nouvelles perspec-tives en sciences sociales: revue international de systemique complexe et detudesrelationelles published a special issue on French-Canadian relational sociologyin 2009.

Relational thinking has been developing in other human and social sciences as

well. Stetsenko (2008), for instance, writes that such classics of psychology (and

pedagogy) as Piaget, Dewey, and Vygotsky embodied strong relational thinking.

Currently, a relational ontology has been adopted and has also become quite

prominent in developmental psychology, cultural anthropology, social psychology,

and education. (For a representative of one contemporary relational psychology, see

Gergen (2009)).

Within sociology, undoubtedly the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu is the most

prominent and most developed example of relational sociology; below, the

Bourdieusian framework is introduced as an insightful platform for relational,

intergenerational childhood studies. For Bourdieu, thinking in terms of relations

instead of substances is paramount. It is central to his vision of sociology as

a science, and essentially all the concepts he has developed are relational

(Wacquant 1992, p. 19).

Bourdieu incessantly criticizes what he calls substantialism, or the spontane-

ous theory of knowledge that he sees as a key obstacle to developing genuine

scientific knowledge of the social world (Swartz 1997, p. 61). Substantialism

designates an epistemology that focuses on the realities of ordinary sense experi-

ence and treats the properties attached to agents occupation, age, sex, qualifica-

tions - as forces independent of the relationship within which they act (Bourdieu1984, p. 22). Moreover, substantialism is inclined to treat the activities and

preferences specific to certain individuals or groups in a society at a certain moment

as if they were substantial properties, inscribed once and for all in a sort of

biological or cultural essence (Bourdieu 1998, p. 4). Thus, substantialist thinking

reflects a commonsensical perception of social reality, a perception which is also

embedded in the very language we use, as it expresses things more easily than

relations, states more readily than processes (Bourdieu 1994, p. 189, 1998,

pp. 34). Therefore, it is easier to treat social facts as things or as persons than it

is to treat them as relations (Bourdieu 1994, pp. 189190).

138 L. Alanen

The methodological alternative that Bourdieu advocates and which he iden-

tifies as fundamental to all scientific thinking is relationalism (or relationism).This is a mode of thinking that identifies the real, not with substances, but

with relationships, for the stuff of social reality lies in relations (Wacquant1992, pp. 1519).

It is argued here that the conceptual tool kit that Bourdieu developed in his

lifework is useful for re-crafting the practices of sociological childhood research

on a structural-relational basis. His relational ontology is, furthermore, consistent

with some important trends and recent developments across natural, human, and

social sciences where a systemic (i.e., structural) and at the same time emergentistunderstanding of reality both natural and social has gained new ground. (For

the development of systemic theory in sociology and of emergentism as the most

important element of the theorys third wave, see Sawyer (2005) and Wan

(2011)). Owing to this, by adopting a consistently relational orientation and

putting it into work in researching childhood, the field will profit from being

open toward the possibilities of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary collabo-

ration with a range of other disciplines and research fields, such as (relational)

psychology, economics, philosophy of mind, and others. The intergenerationality

of childhood will also be exposed as a methodological perspective, instead

of merely a substantive research object (which, moreover, tends toward

substantialism).

5.4 Childhood as a Generational Phenomenon

The structural sociologies of childhood that began to develop in the work of the

international project Childhood as a Social Phenomenon (19871992) were already

based on (intuitive) forms of relational thinking (see Qvortrup et al. 1994). The

concept of generation particularly was seen as the key to a new, relational under-standing of childhood (Alanen 1994; 2009).

In the 1980s, joined by a concern for studying childhood, a loose network, and

then later, an international community of sociologists, gave rise to the term gen-

eration, identifying it as a key concept for establishing this new manner of thinking

in the social sciences. Jens Qvortrup (1985, 1987) was one of the first to argue the

case: In 1987, for instance, he wrote that in industrial society the concept of

generation has acquired a broader meaning than in earlier societal formations as

children and adults have now assumed structural attributes relative to each

other. It was therefore useful, he wrote, to treat childhood and adulthood as

structural elements in an interactive relation and childhood as a particular social

status (Qvortrup 1987, p. 19).

In everyday discourse as well as in social science, generational relations tend to

refer to relationships between individuals who are located in different stages within

their life courses such as adults and children or between individuals currently

living through the same life stage Intergenerational in this parlance refers to the

relationships or connectedness between individuals belonging to different

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 139

generations. In addition, other uses of generation exist as a range of sociological

discourses and modes of generational analysis. However, the idea of childhood

proposed by Qvortrup, as an element of social structure, called for sociological

tools that were not readily available in this literature. What was particularly missing

from the literature was a new focus on the acknowledgement and elaboration of the

fundamentally relational nature of the socially recognized categories of children

and adults.

Isolated calls had been issued for the need for relational understandings of

childhood as well as of the other generational categories with which childhood

was connected; for example, in 1982, the British scholars, John Fitz and John Hood-

Williams (1982), wrote that

If we wish to understand youth and childhood we have to proceed not by studies of

discrete phenomena but by studies of relationships, since youth [or childhood/LA] is not

a function of age but a social category constituted in relation to, and indeed in opposition to,

the category adult (as is feminine to masculine). (Fitz and Hood-Williams 1982, p. 65)

Later in the 1980s, a structural generational perspective was adopted in the

research of the international Childhood as a Social Phenomenon project

(19871992), assembled and organized to study the characteristic social features

of childhood across a number of Western societies. The core idea in the projects

approach was the dynamic social relations between generations which now were

understood as the elements (or units) of a social, generational structure.

As remarked upon above, generation is common currency in everyday speech,

used in many senses and for a variety of purposes. Children, for instance, are

frequently spoken of as being the next generation (of adults), or reference is

made to the contemporary generation of children. We also identify ourselves

and other people as members of different generations (the 68 generation, my

grandparents generation) and thereby point to and make sense of both the

differences that we observe between people of different age and their interrela-

tionships, in terms of exchange, solidarity, conflict, or gaps in mutual

understanding. Moreover, by identifying people as members of particular gener-

ations, we locate them in historical time, such as when speaking of the war

generation (those adults who lived and suffered through the war years) or the

war children. (This refers to the tens of thousands of Finnish children who were

sent from Finland during the Second World War to a safer life in neighboring

Sweden or Denmark).

As the Greek and Latin etymologies of the word imply genealogies and succes-

sion, generations are frequently defined according to relational lines of descent

(Jaeger 1977, p. 430; Corsten 1999, p. 250). The original meaning is linked to

kinship: descent along family lineage, but the sense has been generalized to also

cover social descent so that people speak of, for instance, second generation

sociologists (Corsten 1999, p. 251). This sense of kinship relations is the one that

particularly demographers wish to reserve for generation (e.g., Kertzer 1983). This

is also the sense in which generation is used in historical research: to describe

succession in collective history (Jaeger 1977).

140 L. Alanen

5.5 Generational Analysis: Mannheim and Beyond

Such usages of generation similarly circulate in sociological texts. However, in

scientific reviews of the field, Karl Mannheim is unanimously credited as the

scholar who brought generation into sociology in his famous essay on the

problem of generations (Mannheim 1952/1928). (See for example, Jaeger 1977;

Matthes 1985; Attias-Donfut 1988; Pilcher 1994; Becker 1997; Corsten 1999;

Turner 1999). Mannheim worked out his notion of generations within a sociology

of culture frame (Matthes 1985; Corsten 1999). In this view, generations needed to

be understood and investigated as cultural phenomena that were formed in specific

social and historical contexts. More specifically, Mannheim argued that generations

are formed when members of a particular age-group (or cohort) live through the

same historical and social events during their youthful years and experience them as

significant to themselves. Through this shared experience, they come to develop

a common consciousness, or identity, which can be observed particularly in the

world view and the social and political attitudes of the age-group in question. In

addition, world views and attitudes tend to persist over the life course of cohort

members, making membership in the same generation easily identifiable to the

members themselves and to others later on.

In Mannheims cultural sociology, generations grow out of age-groups (cohorts),

but they become identifiable generations only under specific circumstances. His

conceptualization of the formation of generations proceeds in three stages. Firstly,

people born (or located) in the same period of social and historical time within

a society are exposed to a specific range of social events and ideas. At this stage,

they can be identified as sharing a generational location; here they are only

a potential generation, which exists merely in the mind of the researcher, not

for the group members, who are not linked through actual relationships.

Mannheim reflects on the analogy between class and generation, noting that the

class position of an individual is a different sort of social category, materially quite

unlike the generation but bearing a certain structural resemblance to it. The bases

of the two positions class and generation naturally differ, and generation, as well

as all the further historical and social formations growing out of shared generational

positions, is ultimately seen to be based on the biological rhythm of birth and

death (Mannheim 1952/1928, p. 290). He then extends the analogy to class and

generational positions and sees both as an objective fact, whether the individual in

question knows his class [generational] position or not, and whether he acknowl-

edges it or not (Mannheim 1952/1928, p. 289). The second stage in the formation

of generations involves the development of a shared interpretation of experiences

and definition of situations among those who share a generational location:

When this takes place, the potential generation becomes an actual generation

analogous to the development of a class in itself to a class for itself. Thirdly, in

some cases, the differentiation within actual generations may lead to the forma-

tion of generational units, characterized by face-to-face interaction among its

members and similar ways of reacting to the issues they meet as a generation

(Mannheim 1952/1928, pp. 290, 302312; Corsten 1999, pp. 253255).

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 141

In summary, Mannheim conceptualizes generations as being first socially and

historically formed and then, once formed, as possibly exerting an influence on the

course of events. Thus, his aim was to propose his theory of generations as a theory of

social change, or of intellectual evolution (Mannheim 1952/1928, p. 281), in which

particular culturally formed groups act as collective agents and cultural bearers of

social transformation, based on the socialization of cohort members during their

formative years of youth (Becker 1997, pp. 910; cf. Mannheim 1952/1928,

pp. 292308). (For criticisms directed atMannheims theory, among them the assump-

tions on youth and socialization on which he relies, see Pilcher (1995, pp. 2325)).

For decades after the publication of his seminal essay (in 1928), there was notmuch

treatment of the subject in sociology. Later, Mannheims thinking did evoke some

response butmainly from a few small subdisciplines, such as the study of youth groups

and youth cultures. Since the 1960s, developments in a few specific areas of social

research, such as social demography, life course analysis, and gerontology, have taken

a closer look at Mannheims theory of generations and utilized it in their research.

In this activity, scholars clarified some of the confusion found in earlier usages

(including Mannheims) of generation and developed precise distinctions and

conceptualizations useful for the empirical aims of research. These include particu-

larly the conceptual and terminological distinctions between generation, cohort, and

(individual) age (e.g., Ryder 1965; Kertzer 1983; Becker 1992; Becker and Hermkens

1993). Specific new research programs have evolved out of this activity, and space has

beenmade for the field of generations research or, more accurately, for cohorts and

generations research to emerge (Becker 1997).

In her book on age and generation in Britain, Pilcher (1995, pp. 2225) presents

the similar cohorts and social generation theory as one of the ways in which

sociologists have tried to explain the social significance of age. The other four in

her book are the following: the life course perspective, functionalist perspectives,

political economy perspectives, and interpretive perspectives (Pilcher 1995,

pp. 1630). An abundant discussion on the concept of generation and generational

issues has in recent years also been going on in German-language social science

research (and public debate); see, for example, Liebau and Wulf (1996), Ecarius

(1998), and Honig (1999). For some of the causes for this renaissance, see

Corsten (1999, pp. 249250)).

Concerning the current situation, research on generations in the Mannheimian

tradition has forged for itself a secure place within (empirical) social research. In

this research, Mannheims original emphasis on youth as the key period for making

fresh contacts with social life and forming generational experiences has remained

strong. Sociologists of childhood may, for good reasons, question this continued

stress on youth by asking the following: Why first young people? Are not children theobvious fresh cohort entering social life and, therefore, also capable of sharing expe-

riences in historical time and place, that is, of becoming a generation in a true

Mannheimian sense? While there has been some criticism directed at generations

research for its tendency to overlook cohorts that are living through their later years,

and their potential for generating specific generational experiences (e.g., Pilcher 1995),

a similar criticism has not been directed at the treatment of children in generations

142 L. Alanen

research. One plausible explanation for this curious omission lurks in Ryders article

(1965, pp. 851852) where he writes of the model of socialization and development

dominating the literature of his time. He argues that as long as life is conventionally

seen as a movement from amorphous plasticity through mature competence towards

terminal rigidity, young children are seen as being merely in a preparatory phase,

whereas youth (and adults) are considered participants in social life.

The more recent sociological work on childhood would object to this view and

bring forward evidence to the effect that children, too, are participants in social life,

and therefore, the Mannheimian frame is fully applicable in childhood research as

well. A rare case of this is the German research on children war, of consumption

and of crisis (Preuss-Lausitz et al. 1983), by a group of altogether thirteen

researchers who explore the shared experiences of three different cohorts of chil-

dren in post-World War II Germany. The research was done before the emergence

of the sociology of childhood, and the authors identified their project as being one in

socialization history. (This book can in fact be seen to be pioneering the sociol-

ogy of childhood in the German-language area). If the applicability of the

Mannheimian frame also in the study of childhood, then the further Mannheimian

question of do children also form active generational groups (or units)? can

likewise be opened to further investigation.

In summary, very little attention has been given to generational issues outside

this generations and cohorts research niche within the social science field. Nor have

issues of age been attended to until recently and in a few cases. In the British

context, Janet Finch (1986) describes the use of age in ways that are theoretically

informed and empirically rigorous as relatively uncharted territory, and Jane

Pilcher (1994) notes that the neglect of the sociology of generations parallels the

lack of attention paid to the social significance of age. In the 1990s, there has been

a burgeoning of theorizing and research on age, Pilcher (1994) writes, lamenting

that in this new activity there still is a lack of theorizing and research in terms of

generations meaning theorizing and research in the Mannheimian tradition.

Harriet Bradley, too, in her book subtitled Changing Patterns of Inequality

(Bradley 1996), sees age as the more important dimension of stratification than

generation and accordingly devotes one full chapter to Age: The Neglected

Dimension of Stratification. Within that chapter, generation is given two pages,

mainly introducing Mannheims work.

There is however more to discover and rediscover in generation, by going

beyond the line of analysis that has stemmed from Mannheims important work.

In recent decades, many social conditions to which childhood has also been

compared gender, class, ethnicity, and (dis)ability have been submitted to

a critical, deconstructive gaze, by first interpreting them as social constructions

and then reconceptualizing and researching them from a number of theoretical

(post-positivist) perspectives. In feminist/gender studies, gender continues to be

discussed and analyzed and is variously theorized as a material, social, and/or

discursive structure, while naturally through the history of sociology as

a scientific discipline, (social) class provides a central concept for analyzing

and explaining social divisions and structural inequalities. Both ethnic studies and

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 143

disability studies are more recent fields of research; they bring into focus and

redefine both race/ethnicity and disability as socially constructed phenomena

and seek to generate theoretical perspectives for research on these particular social

constructions of inequality and exclusion. (On discussions on this in, for example,

disability studies, see the collection edited by Corker and French (1999)).

There are good reasons to believe that in a similar manner, sociologists will

learn more about childhood as a social and specifically generational (structural)condition by working on the notion as an analogue to class, gender, ethnicity, or

disability. The suggestion is that generation needs to be brought into childhood

studies and childhood needs to be brought into generational studies. Such an

approach, moreover, needs to be one that also holds to the basic premise of the

new childhood studies: childrens agency.

5.6 Childhood Relationally: Generational Order(ing)

In the final product of the Childhood as a Social Phenomenon project (Qvortrup

et al. 1994), a number of analyses were presented on the relations between children

and childhood and between childhood and adulthood. Furthermore, new concepts

were suggested to develop further the projects idea of macro-level generational

structuring that impacts the everyday conditions, actions, and experiences of

children. The notion of a generational order was one of them (Alanen 1994; alsoAlanen 1992, pp. 6471); it was proposed as a useful analytic tool to work on and to

refine, as well as to develop into a comprehensive sociological framework.

The central idea in the notion of a generational order is that a system of socialordering exists in modern societies that specifically pertains to children as a social

category and circumscribes for them particular social locations from which they

act, and thereby participate in ongoing social life.

As children are seen to be involved in the daily construction of their own and

other peoples everyday relationships and life trajectories, the notion would also

capture the idea of children as social actors the idea that would become the

central idea in the sociology of children (cf. Prout and James 1990), with itspreference for ethnographic research with children, and sensitivity to childrens

subjective constructions. Thereby, the notion of a generational order could also

hold the promise of helping to transcend the theoretical and methodological divide

between structure and agency a divide that continues to keep apart, theoretically

and methodologically, the different sociologies of children and childhood that have

emerged in the subfield. This disconnection remains even today a challenge to the

sociology of childhood.

In addition, the notion of generational order, once fully elaborated both theoret-

ically and methodologically, and put into empirical use, promises to help sociolo-

gists to understand and account for the interconnections between childhoods many

structurations: Generational ordering can be included as one of the organizing

principles of social relations in social life, in this case the social relations in

which children are a significant partner, in addition to and alongside the more

144 L. Alanen

recognized such as social class, gender, ethnicity, and (dis)ability. Each of these

latter categories was long understood as pre-given conditions within the natural

order of things, and each of them has been submitted to critical analysis and

deconstruction. As their socially constructed nature has been revealed and their

long-lived misrecognition (Bourdieu) as natural facts undermined, new questions

on their construction, operation, and effects could be raised for study, driving

forward their reconceptualization to the point that now each of these structural

categories has a place within social theory and research, even if they also have

remained contested concepts. Furthermore, as they all operate in the same social

space, that is, society, their interconnections have emerged as a topic (intersec-

tionality) for social science research.

The major significance of the notion of a generational order then is that it gives

a name and sociological content to the processes through which the social world is

organized in terms of generational distinction: The social world is a gendered,classed, and raced world, and it is also generationed. In the case of children,

their lives, experiences, and knowledges are not only gendered, classed, and

raced (and so on) but also and most importantly for the sociological study of

childhood generationed.

To begin to do so, conceptual autonomy (cf. Thorne 1987) is to be granted to

the generational segment of the social world. Generational order provides one

conceptual starting point and an analytical tool for framing the study of childhood

in ways that will capture the structured nature of childhood as well as childrens

active presence in generational (structuring) structures while endorsing the internal,

necessary connectedness the relationality of generational structures.

During the work of the Childhood as a Social Phenomenon project, the

fundamentally relational nature of generational categories of which childhood

and adulthood were the projects primary focus was assumed but did not receive

special analytical attention. What the project did achieve was an argument for and

demonstration of the usefulness of collecting statistical information, using children

as units of counting and of quantitative analysis.

Compiling childhood statistics on childrens families, their living conditions,

poverty, and other aspects and comparing the information with data on the

other generational categories (adults), is a case of categorical generational analysis(cf. Connell 1987). The interrelations within and between the categories are exter-

nal, or contingent, in the sense that the category is defined in terms of a number

of shared attributes, such as income, education, attitudes, and life chances, the

generational category of children being typically categorized in terms of age.

The relations between the categories may also be internal, or necessary, in thesense that what one category is dependent on its relation to the other, and the

existence of one necessarily presupposes the other (Sayer 1992, pp. 8990; Ollman

2003). It is this feature of internal relationality that characterizes the generational

order as it has been introduced earlier. The idea of a modern nuclear family

exemplifies the case of a generational structure in which the relations are also

internal: It is a system of relations, linking to each other the husband/father, the

wife/mother, and their children, all of which can be conceived as positions within

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 145

the structured network of relations (cf. Porpora 1998, p. 343; Porpora 2002).

Internality implies that the relations of any holder of one position (such as that ofa parent) cannot exist without the other (child) position. What parenting is or

becomes that is, action in the position of a parent in its defining relations is

dependent on the reciprocal action taken by the holder of the position of child.

Similarly, a change of action in one position will probably effect change in the other

position. The interdependency of positional performance as well as identity

does not work only one way, unidirectionally, from parental position to child

position. Interestingly, the term that in the family example corresponds to the

positional performance of the holder of the child position is missing from both

everyday and sociological discourse, presumably because the culturally normative

basis for understanding the child-parent relationship tends to be one way only.

Logically, as Berry Mayall has suggested (1996, p. 49), childing would be the

appropriate counter term to parenting.

A parallel example is given by the structured system of teacher-student

positions. The case can be expanded from micro- to meso- level interrelations,

by bringing in the complexities in which the holder of a teacher position also defines

a position within a broader schooling system. The complex structure of schooling(including even the family system) can further be seen to exist in an equally internal

relation to a particular welfare state structure, or a labor market structure, and thisin turn will be internally related to wider economic and cultural structures that

potentially extend to global (economic, cultural) structures. (It is commonly

assumed that social structures include only big objects, such as the international

division of labor, or the labor market, while they of course include also small ones

at the interpersonal and intrapersonal levels (Sayer 1992, p. 92)).

Thus, the generational structures that we may find to exist as truly relational

structures can be expected to be embedded in chains or networks of further

relational structures, be they generational or otherwise (e.g., class or gender

structures); the implication is that the determinations of generational structures

and positions within them (as within any social structure) are always dynamic and

complex.

The distinguishing feature, by which we may find relational social structures

in existence and the way by which to determine the possibilities of actual

performance of the holders of its structured positions, is interdependency.However,as Sayer (1992, pp. 8991) notes, the relationship need not be, and often is not,

symmetrical in both directions. The familial generational structure, for instance, is

(usually) one of asymmetry, as are the generational structure of teacher-student, and

many other structures of relations embedded in the organization of the welfare state

and the organizations of global governance.

To further expand on the notion of internal versus external relations, toward

categorical versus relational theorizing, it is instructive to think also of gender

(or gender structures) as being composed of internal relations and then relate this

idea to a concept of gender based on external relations. R. W. Connell (1987) does

this in an examination of some of the most current frameworks of gender theory.

Among them are theories that Connell called categorical (1987, pp. 5461).

146 L. Alanen

In an analysis based on categorical theorizing, the gender categories as they exist

for us mostly men and women, or some subcategories of each are taken as the

starting point, and the study aims at finding how the categories relate to each other

in terms of a chosen aspect, for example, life chances or resources. The problem-

atic point in categorical theorizing, Connell concludes, is that an analysis that

begins by setting a simple line of demarcation between gender positions is not able

to pay attention to the process of how the gender categories and the relationsbetween the categories are constituted in the first place and are subsequently

reproduced or, as it may be, transformed. The consequence is that categorical

theories of gender are forced to treat both genders in terms of internally undiffer-entiated, homogeneous, and general categories, thereby inviting criticism of falseuniversalism and sometimes even of falling back on biological thinking. To resolve

this categoricalism, Connell advocates what he calls practice-based theorizing

that focuses on what people do by way of constituting the relations they live in

(Connell 1987, pp. 6164).

The risk of undifferentiated treatment of category members is also evident in the

structural approach to childhood that starts from the social category of children as

their unit and demarcates this unit (mostly) on the basis of chronological age (cf.

Qvortrup 2000). Children, as well as their counterparts in the analysis (i.e., adults),

are in fact brought into the analysis as demographical age categories or sets of birth

cohorts. The translation of the generational into the social construct of agemoves the analysis close to cohort-based (statistical) generational analysis. In the

kind of structural approach to generational analysis that Jens Qvortrup has advo-

cated, the (contingent) relations between the categories of children and adults are

given an economic interpretation, and (macro-)economical processes are brought

into the analysis to explain the economic situation of the age-defined category of

children. Therefore, Qvortrups approach could be seen as a modification of

Weberian class analysis or, closer to the study of childhood, a modification

of Karl Mannheims generational analysis; only children are now shown to form

not a cultural but an economic generation in that they are shown to share a set of

economic risks and opportunities. In this view, the definition of their generational

nature their childness is based on an observable similarity or shared attribute,

or sets of them, among individual children, therefore, on more external than

internal relations.

There is also another interesting feature in category-based analyses in which the

focus is on the economic aspects of generational relations. An example is David

Oldmans thought-provoking framing of childrens activities in the Children as

a Social Phenomenon book Childhood Matters (Oldman 1994). Oldman aims toshow how in capitalist societies the relations between the (generational) classes of

children and adults have become organized as economic relations. The suggestionis that adults and children are social categories which exist principally by their

economic opposition to each other and in the ability of the dominant class (adults)

to exploit economically the activities of the subordinate class (children). Children,

through their various everyday activities, in fact produce value to adults who

perform child work, that is, work in which children are the objects of the adults

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 147

labor (Oldman 1994, pp. 4347). As family is only one of many sites where this

class opposition and exploitation takes place (school being another), Oldman

concludes that there exists a distinctive generational mode of production thatarticulates with two other existing modes of production: the capitalist mode that

dominates in the industrial sphere and the patriarchal mode that dominates in the

domestic sphere (Oldman 1994, pp. 5558).

In his bold interpretation of child-adult relations, Oldman clearly confines the

generational ordering of social relations under the logic of production. Many of

the analyses that have focused on structural relations between childhood and

adulthood have followed the same idea when outlining the evolving structures of

economic relations between the two generational categories of children and

adults (e.g., Qvortrup 1995; Wintersberger 1998, 2005; Hengst 2000; Olk and

Wintersberger 2007).

In contrast, the notion of a generational order advocated above intends to provide

a frame for analysis by leaving it to empirical study to discover what actually is theconstitutive principle in the social ordering, and organizing, of child-adult relationsin each (i.e., national or institutional) case and in different social fields. In some

cases, it may be primarily economic; in the case of other structures, the cultural may

dominate. In any case, this approach enables a more dynamic conceptualization of

generational structures than seems possible if the starting point is based on gener-

ational categories.

To conclude on the basic features of an analysis of generational structures, the

aim is to be able to identify the internal relations that link children to the socialworld, the (relational) positions that define childness in each historical time-space, and the social (relational) practices (cf. Connell 1987) in which the positionsconstitutive of childness are concurrently produced and maintained and

occasionally transformed.

To summarize the generational order, the basic principles of the social order

that is, the ways in which members of a society relate to each other and to the whole

of their society also include the arrangement of relations between generational

groups. In this sense, the social order is also always a generational order (e.g.,

Buhler-Niederberger 2005, p. 9; cf. Honig 1996; 1999, p. 190).The ideas of a generational order and processes of generational ordering already

embrace some of the basic ideas of relational thinking. In order to further develop

a relational conceptualization of childhood, a second analytical round will be taken;

we will return to the conceptual tools that Pierre Bourdieu developed in his

lifework based on a relational ontology.

5.7 Toward a Relational Sociology of Childhood

One of Bourdieus central goals in developing his theoretical approach was to assist

in overcoming sociologys customary antinomies, such as individual versus society,

micro- versus macroanalysis, phenomenological versus structural approaches, and

subjectivism versus objectivism antinomies that are also clearly visible in the

148 L. Alanen

existing polarity between (1) micro-sociologies of children that focus theiranalysis directly on children as (inter)actors in their everyday social worlds and

(2) macro-sociologies of childhood that take childhood to be an element of thesocial structures or a structure in its own right. Bourdieus route for transcending

such polarities is to move social analysis from its more customary substantialist

mode of thinking to a relational mode. This is why Bourdieus work can be used as

a thinking model for bridging the gap that currently complicates theoretical and

methodological advancement in the social study of childhood.

As argued above, generation has been identified as a particularly useful notion

for sociologists of childhood to work with; the proposal is to approach generation

relationally and not as a property or substance attached to agents. The invitation

is to envision distinct socially and historically constructed sets, or systems, of

relations between groups or categories of people relations that we may recognize

as specifically generational relations. As earlier remarked, relations between the

generational categories of children and adults, or parents and children, or

teachers and students present lucid examples of such relations that are inter-

nally related, in the sense that one category (such as children) cannot exist

without the other, and the socially constructed meaning of one category is depen-

dent on the meaning of the other category.

The following section expands on Bourdieus relational approach by describing

the main contours of his theory of social fields; the suggestion is to utilize it by

applying it to the study of the intergenerational encounters (family being the case),

now conceptualized as social fields.

5.7.1 A Sociology of Fields

Instead of affirming that the ontological priority lies with structure or with actors,the collective or the individual, Bourdieus sociology affirms the primacy of socialrelations (Wacquant 1992, p. 15). To think relationally means, as presented above,

to move away from substantialist thinking that begins from socially pre-given

categorical entities; relational thinking, in contrast, centers on the relations and

the systems of relations that generate and naturalize the observable (and often

conventional) social categories (i.e., children).

In sociology there is a tradition of relationalism it was by no means Bourdieus

invention. Bourdieu, however, labored particularly relentlessly in order to establish

a thoroughly relational sociology, well evidenced by the fact that his key concepts

(such as field and habitus) designate bundles of relations (Wacquant 1992, p. 16).Field, according to Bourdieu, should also be the primary focus of social analysis:

The notion of field reminds us that the true object of social science is not the individual,

even though one cannot construct a field if not through individuals, [. . .]. It is the field thatis primary and must be the focus of the research operations. This does not imply that

individuals are mere illusions, that they do not exist: they exist as agents and not as

biological individuals, actors, or subjects who are socially constituted as active and acting

in the field under consideration by the fact that they possess the necessary properties to be

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 149

effective, to produce effects, in this field. And it is knowledge of the field itself in which

they evolve that allows us best to grasp the roots of their singularity, their point of view or

position (in a field) from which their particular vision of the world (and of the field itself) is

constructed. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 107)

What then is a field?

In analytical terms, a field may be defined as a network, or a configuration, of objective

relations between positions. [. . .] In highly differentiated societies, the social cosmos ismade up of a number of such relatively autonomous social microcosms, i.e., spaces of

objective relations that are the site of a logic and a necessity that are specific and irreducible

to those that regulate other fields. For instance, the artistic field, or the religious field, or the

economic field all follow specific logics: while the artistic field has constituted itself by

rejecting or reversing the law of material profit [. . .], the economic field has emerged,historically, through the creation of a universe within which, as we commonly say,

business is business, where the enchanted relations of friendship and love are in principle

excluded. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, pp. 9798)

In his early empirical work in which he also developed his theory of practice,

Bourdieu gave field a minor place. It is in his later works that field comes increas-ingly to replace the polysemantic concept of structure that he used in earlier texts

(Reed-Danahay 2004, p. 133). Subsequently, field gains an increasingly centralplace in Bourdieus theoretical system. He continued to refine his conceptual tools

throughout his career in empirical studies, with the analytical weight of fieldincreasing as Bourdieu moved toward analyzing contemporary French society

and its structuredness into fields and as fields (Swartz 1997, p. 117).

In the 1970s and 1980s, the main focus of Bourdieus work was on class, culture,

and education. In these studies, field was made to refer to the social space in

which Bourdieu (with the help of the method of correspondence analysis) located

the actors of the social domain in question according to the volume of the economic

and cultural capital that the actors possessed. In an essay on the intellectual field

(1966), he had already developed some of the main ideas of his forthcoming theory

of fields (Lane 2000, pp. 7273), giving the concept the analytical meaning that the

concept retained in his later, distinctly relational theory.

Bourdieus theory of fields may be considered to be his theory of society. While

in archaic societies (such as the Kabyle he studied in Algeria, in the 1960s) there

is only one field, in modern differentiated societies the number of fields grows:

They exist parallel to each other, they intersect, and there may be subfields within

larger fields. In Bourdieus conceptualization, modern societies are composed of

multiple domains of action fields that are distinct from each other. A field is

a relational historical formation: a network, or configuration, of objective relations

between positions (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 125), a system of positions,

and a social space structured by positions. Accordingly, action (practice) taking

place in a field is understood and explained only by identifying the agents

individuals and institutions currently active in the field, the structure of relations

that differentiate (and connect) them, and the game that is taking place among the

actors, the game being struggles about control of the resources (capitals) that arevalued and held legitimate in the field. Each field has its own rules, or logic, and

150 L. Alanen

therefore, the game and rules of one field are different from the games and rules of

other fields. What fields do share is their (homologous) structure: All fields are

structured by relations of dominance. This applies also to the family which can be

described in field-analytical terms. As fields are dynamic formations, they have their

birth (genesis) and developmental history, and the game played in a field may

remain even after the field disappears. In addition, the relations of influence between

fields vary; therefore, fields might subsequently vary in their degree of autonomy.

Bourdieus probably best-known analysis of fields concerns the field of cultural

production (the production of arts and literature) in France. Bourdieu

(1993) explained how this area first struggled into an autonomous position in

relation to the heteronomous forces of economy, politics, and the state. The

analysis was focused particularly on the struggles of nineteenth-century painters

and writers (Manet, Flaubert, Baudelaire) for freedom from the structural domi-

nance of, first, the court and the church, then of the salons, and, finally, of the

Academy of France. Once autonomy was successfully fought for and gained for

the field of cultural production, space was assured for the artists own game. The

development of this field took place in three stages: First, it was born by way of

separating itself from dominance by other fields already in existence. The move

from a state of heteronomy to that of autonomy marked the arrival of the second

stage in which the avant-garde guaranteed the field autonomy. However, the

accomplishment of autonomy was simultaneously the beginning of internal differ-

entiation, as the struggles within the field were reorganized by actors that in the new

state of autonomy developed new logics (strategies) of action. The third stage in the

development of a field is thus marked by diminishing autonomy. In Bourdieus

example of cultural production in nineteenth-century France, the field of economy

was expanding its influence on cultural production. The market for art objects was

born, relying on a new logic, and the field moved back to a state of heteronomy,

albeit of a qualitatively different kind from the earlier stage of heteronomy.

Many of the fields that Bourdieu himself studied are cultural spaces, such as art,

literature, religion, justice, education, university, and journalism, all of which are

well-institutionalized social domains, with a fairly large degree of autonomy

although they also constantly need to struggle to keep this autonomy. Most of

the research on fields by other scholars has also focused on well-established,

institutionalized, and public arenas, such as the media, higher education,

economic policy, the world of academic research, or public welfare services.

Much less attention has been focused on private domains, such as the household

or family, or on informally organized or voluntary relations (peer relations,

friendship). Can these also be understood as fields?

A second question concerns who or what qualifies as an agent in a specific field.

Agents exist not as a biological individuals, actors, or subjects, but as agents who

are socially constituted as active and acting in the field under consideration by the

fact that they possess the necessary properties to be effective, to produce effects, in

this field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 107).

This qualification will not exhaust the whole range of actors that sociologists

(including sociologists of childhood) commonly think of and treat as social actors.

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 151

Bernard Lahire (2001, pp. 3237) follows Bourdieu in his contention that the

existence of a field presupposes illusion, that is, that there exist a sufficient numberof participants that actually invest in the struggles (games) of the field and keep

up the game these are agents in the Bourdieusian sense:

In empirical work, it is one and the same thing to determine what the field is, where its

limits lie, etc., and to determine what species of capital are active in it, within what limits,

and so on. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, pp. 9899)

The systemic nature of Bourdieus theory implies that all of the concepts of his

relational theoretical universe have a role to play in recognizing/reconstructing

a field. (See Lahire (2001, pp. 2426) for a meticulously compiled list of altogether

13 characteristics by which to recognize and analytically construct a Bourdieusian

field). But how and where to start the study of a field? Where to start especially

when the object of concern is the everyday world of ordinary people children and

adults instead of such wide institutionalized worlds of action as government,

university, church, or media world?

The institutional aspects in the action of individuals and groups are significant

issues to focus on in a field analysis, but a field is not identical to an institution

(Swartz 1997, pp. 120121). A field may be in fact located within an institution or it

may reach across two (or more) institutions; the institution may also be one of the

positions in a field. Moreover, a field may be emerging in which the practices are

not yet strongly institutionalized. The most distinctive differentiating feature of a

field from an institution is that the concept a field underlines is by nature conflictual

(Swartz 1997). This is a clear distinction from the (functionalist, consensus-based)

understanding of an institution.

Bourdieu himself identifies three internally connected moments in a field anal-

ysis (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 104). First, one must analyze the position of

the field in relation to the field of power and, next, the objective structure of the

positions held by actors or institutions that compete for the legitimate form of

capital specific to the field. The field of power is not situated on the same level as

other fields (the literary, economic, scientific, state bureaucratic, etc.) since it

encompasses them in part. It should be thought of more as a kind of meta-field

with a number of emergent and specific properties (Wacquant 1992, p. 18).

Finally, the habitus of the actors need to be studied. Habitus together with theconcepts of field and capital form Bourdieus principal conceptual triad. Habitus is

a durable and transposable system of schemata of perception, appreciation,

and action; habitus focuses on our ways of acting, feeling, thinking and being,it captures how we carry within us history, how we bring this history into our

present circumstances, and how we then make choices to act in certain ways and not

with others (Maton 2008, p. 52). It is the construct of habitus with which Bourdieuintends to transcend the series of deep-seated dichotomies such as subjectivism-

objectivism and structure-agency, among others. However, as the concept of field

does not offer any ready-made answers, fields need to be constructed case by case(Maton 2008, p. 139). (For a detailed account of the three analytical stages for

constructing a field as an object of study, see Alanen (2007)).

152 L. Alanen

5.7.2 A Case of Generational Ordering: Family as a Social Field

The significance of family in Bourdieus theorizing and in his studies (especiallyBourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1984) stems from his interest in under-

standing the social mechanisms by which social inequalities are reproduced. In

modern societies, family, alongside education, is a central reproductive mechanism.

Family, therefore, appears in Bourdieus theorizing in several contexts: Family

appears as a field; it may also be a component of habitus; family may also providethe members of a family group with resources social capital that they canconvert into other forms of capital in their exchanges in other fields, thereby helping

them to function effectively in the games of other fields. Lastly, the family can be

understood as a form of practice. Next, only an outline of family as a field ispresented.

A sociologist will without difficulty recognize and analyze any family, or a large

group of kin, as a field of interactions taking place between family members.

Bourdieu, however, is adamant in asserting that family should not be identified as

a domain of everyday domestic interactions. Within his relational theorizing, it is

important to notice that the family

tends to function as a field, with its physical, economic and above all symbolic power

relations (linked, for example, to the volume and structure of the capital possessed by each

member), and its struggles to hold on to and transform these power relations. (Bourdieu

1998, pp. 6869; also 1996, p. 22; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977, p. 18)

To perceive family as a social body within which members struggle or compete

with each other goes utterly against contemporary and conventional thinking.

Buchner and Brake (2006, pp. 2526), in their study on the intergenerationaltransmission of cultural capital, are among the few researchers that make this

point. Following Bourdieu, they note that we tend to be attached to an (idealized)

picture of family in which emotional closeness and relations of trust and confidence

take a central place, and the intrinsic purpose of family is to create an emotional

counterbalance to the harsh competition and obligations to perform outside family.

This idea as well as the idea of society being divided into a public and a private

sphere and of family as the center of the latter has been asserted by numerous

sociologists (since at least Talcott Parsons). This vision of the family as a domainseparates from the public domain of the economy and the state and, following

a specific logic of its own, is reinforced by the division of society into families(Bourdieu 1998, p. 66). Both the vision and the division are, of course, historical

constructs, although commonly experienced as being natural (see below).

In contrast, it is Bourdieus claim that in its modern representation the family

should be approached as only a word, a mere verbal construct, or paper family

(Bourdieu 1998, p. 65). Nevertheless, it is also a well-founded fiction and an

active word in that it is a collective principle of construction, perception, and

categorization of collective reality (Bourdieu 1998, p. 66; Lenoir 1992, 2008)

Family, then, is an instrument of construction of reality that exists both in the

objectivity of the world, in the form of elementary social bodies that we call

5 Childhood and Intergenerationality 153

families, and in peoples minds, in the form of principles of classification that are

implemented both by ordinary agents and by the licensed operators of official

classifications, such as state statisticians (Bourdieu 1998, p. 71). The state, then,

is the main agent of the construction of the official categories through which

both populations and minds are structured (Bourdieu 1998, 1996, pp. 2425;

Lenoir 2008, pp. 3940). Therefore, in a society that is divided into family groups

(such as contemporary Western industrialized societies), the family is not

just a subjective idea, a mental and cognitive category, it is also an objective social

category. Thus, as such it is in fact the basis of the family as a subjective social

category the mental category which is the matrix of countless representations

and actions (such as marriages) which help to reproduce the objective

social category. The circle is that of reproduction of the social order (Bourdieu

1998, p. 67), and

[t]he near-perfect match that is then set up between the subjective and objective categories

provides the foundation for an experience of the world as self-evident, taken for granted.

And nothing seems more natural than the family; this arbitrary social construct seems to

belong on the side of nature, the natural and the universal. (Bourdieu 1998)

The circle of reproduction of the social order leads us to regard the family as

(falsely) natural, by presenting itself with the self-evidence of what has always

been that way, although as historical family research has amply shown it is

a fairly recent social invention (Bourdieu 1998, p. 64). The immediate congruence

between the subjective, mental structures and the objective structures of the family

is historically constructed, and the family is thus the product of countless acts of

institutionalization (Bourdieu 1998, pp. 6769).

Remi Lenoir (1991, 1992, 2003) has extensively analyzed this historical process

of the birth and development the long duree of the family field in France, as ithas appeared in the growth of family thinking (familialism) in state policy, and

the resulting institutionalization of the family in and through, for example, civil law

and family policy. According to his analysis, the family has been (re)constructed

at the intersection of several social fields (such as politics, law, religion, and

medicine) within the struggles between concerned agents in these fields, each

striving to establish from their positions in the respective field, as well as in the

emerging family field, the functions that were to be left to the family to take

care of. In Western Europe, according to Lenoirs analysis, the genesis of the family

field started at some point in the twelfth century and followed much of the

same general pattern as various other social fields analyzed by Bourdieu and his

colleagues: by fighting for its autonomy from the church and the state, most clearly

by the dominant economic classes of the time. The field of religion (in which the

church of course was the most powerful agent) and the field of the state (with its

growth of an apparatus of governance) continue even today to be the most powerful

fields that presently affect the development of the family field. Dandurand and

Ouellette (1995) present a similar analysis of the emergence and structuration of the

family field in Canada. Whether the family field has, and to which degree, achieved

in Western societies a state of autonomy is an open question. Scientific work to

154 L. Alanen

construct a social history of the process of state institutionalization of the family

(Bourdieu 1998, p. 72) will be needed to provide answers which undoubtedly are

conditional on the developments of nation-states.

However, as was presented earlier, the perpetuation of the family as both an

objective and subjective category does not only depend on the constant work of

institutionalization by a range of agents active in the emerging family (macro-)field.

Indeed, the practical and symbolic work of creating (and recreating) the family is

also required on the mundane everyday level within the family groups (actual

families) themselves as well as between them. It is this practical and symbolic

work that

transforms the obligation to love into a loving disposition and tends to endow each member

of the family with a family feeling that generates devotion, generosity, and solidarity.

(Bourdieu 1998, p. 68)

This family feeling which is a cognitive principle of vision and division that

is at the same time an affective principle of cohesion (Bourdieu 1998, p. 68)

needs to be continuously created to function as the basis for the adhesion that is vital

to the existence of the family group in the broader family field. The obliged

affections and affective obligations of family feeling (conjugal love, paternal and

maternal love, filial love, brotherly and sisterly love, etc.) enter, for their part, into

the construction of (real) families. The implication is that a society divided into

families tends to constitute in its members a specific mental structure, or familyhabitus (Bourdieu 1998, pp. 6667; Lenoir 2008, p. 34). The daily work that goesinto creating and recreating the family the subjective and mental category and

the division of society into family groups can be studied as sets of relational

practices of familialization (family making). The fact that everyone believes toknow what the family is confirms the success of the social work (Durkheim)

(consistin