Karl Mannheim could be regarded as the grandfather of generational research. Born in Hungary 1893, he moved to Germany to study philosophy and sociology, with a particular emphasis on the roots of culture. He worked under Alfred Weber, brother of well-known sociologist Max Weber. His essays on the sociology of knowledge are now regarded as classics. Mannheim moved to Britain where he attempted a comprehensive analysis of the structure of modern society by way of democratic social planning and education.

From Wikipedia: Mannheim’s book Ideologie und Utopie (1929) was the most widely debated book by a living sociologist in Germany during the Weimar Republic; the English version Ideology and Utopia (1936) has been a standard in American-style international academic sociology. Mannheim was not the author of any work he himself considered a finished book, but rather of some fifty major essays and treatises, most later published in book form.

It is one of those essays that sparked off generational research. “On the problem of generations”, published in German in 1928, outlined Mannheim’s analysis of the impact of generational experience on groups of people across class and geographical lines.
The essay was published English in 1952 in Collected Works of Karl Mannheim, Vol. 5, Routledge, London. The set of complete works was published again in 1996 by Bryan Turner. The set of resource is so huge and expensive it is only ever bought by libraries.

Edmunds and Turner

June Edmunds and Bryan Turner, in their 2002 book, Generations, Culture and Society, explore the implications of Mannheim’s pivotal essay. Rather than seeing generations as continuations of societal norms, Mannheim portrayed generations as “sources of opposition, challenging existing societal norms and values and bringing social change through collective generational organisation”.

The three building blocks of Mannheim’s theory of generation, as identified by Bryan Turner and June Edmunds, are:

1. Generational Site or Location
Mannheim taught that a generation could be defined in terms of collective response to a traumatic event or catastrophe that united particular cohort of individuals into a self-conscious age stratum. Mannheim was aware of the angst faced by German youth in the wake of World War I, not only in response to trench warfare, but also the poverty and shame associated with international mood.

2. Generation as Actuality
Mannheim critiqued the Marxist tradition of class analysis and deterministic approach to consciousness or knowledge. Age groups, he observed, were able to act as agents of social change and become carriers of intellectual and organisational alternatives to the status quo.

3. Generational Units
Mannheim wrote about ‘articulate structures of knowledge or consciousness that express particular location’. Even though each generation may include within itself a number of ‘differentiated, antagonistic generation-units’ who fight one another, they belong to each other because of their orientation toward each other.