2024-01-21 14:39:35
“Generation Z” is arguably one of the most used words in the workplace these days. Recruitment difficulties have challenged companies to attract and retain young “talents” and numerous analyzes have attempted to identify the expectations of this new generation. This would be hyperconnected to social networks, gender and climate activist, hungry for meaning… but also individualist, disengaged and materialist.
However, like all age groups, this one which has recently entered the labor market is profoundly heterogeneous. It is difficult to paint a uniform portrait, something that the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu already underlined in 1978 with his formula “Youth is just a word”. What if, to better understand these young people, we first started by questioning the concept of “generation”?
One and the same group?
Generation Z is defined as a group of individuals born between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2010s. The dates may vary from one classification to another: most definitions of Generation Z have it beginning in 1997, but others also mention 1996 or even 1995. And the same goes for other generations, such as that of the Y which can begin from 1980 or 1984 or even generation X which designates individuals born between 1965 and 1976, but sometimes limited by 1961-1981 or even 1962-1971.
Even if these variations are slight, they reveal the fragility of these concepts which marketing professionals and the media use and abuse. The author of this article, for example, born in 1980, still does not know whether she belongs to the X or the Y. However, depending on whether we take one or the other hypothesis, the characteristics that will be attributed to her will be quite different, particularly with regard to its relationship to work… To try to see things more clearly, let’s go back to the root of the concept: the notion of generation.
From a demographic point of view, a generation designates a group of people born over the same period, which extends over around twenty years and which refers to the origin “the number of years separating the age of the father from that of the son”. This simplistic vision will be challenged in particular by the sociologist Karl Mannheim, in a article founder of 1928: individuals are not members of the same generation just because they share a birthday, they must also share “an identity of responses, a certain affinity in the way they evolve, live and are shaped and formed by their common experiences.
Mannheim thus proposes defining a generation as an age group sharing a common destiny and demonstrating social cohesion, that is to say the awareness of belonging to the same group. He therefore invites us to consider three variables in parallel: the biological dimension of age but also the historical and social dimensions.
Age effect, generation effect, period effect?
In statistics, the generation effect, the fact of being born on a particular date or of having experienced a particular event, must be distinguished from the age effect. Research that focuses on the evolution of the values of people of the same age over different periods (for example, the professional expectations of 20-year-olds born in 1960, 1980 or 2000) does not identify no cultural ruptures opposing generations.
We thus find in current discourses on Generation Z, the same litany that 20 years ago about Generation Y: “quest for meaning, thirst for personal accomplishment, desire not to “waste your life winning it””. Values which were already manifest among the “68 generation”, seeking to break the sclerotic shackles and traditional relationships in business to make work a vector of personal and collective development. More than “generation effects”, there could therefore be an “age effect” common to all generations: at 20, we are more likely to want to change the world. And we have (or almost) all been there.
In addition to age, a generation must also be placed in a socio-historical context which gives it a common destiny and endows it with real consistency, a “generational identity”. We thus speak of the generation that experienced the war, of the “68 generation” and today sometimes of the “Covid generation”. Young people have in fact had a particularly bad experience of confinements and social isolation, as well as the resulting restriction of distractions, at an age when the desire for social contacts and group activities is often most developed. More than the other age groups, they demonstrated psychosocial disorders which still persist today, as noted by the psychiatrists. Added to this are climatic changes causing a ecoanxiety which particularly affects young people.
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However, here again, the hypothesis of generational specificity seems fragile. Indeed, the anxiety caused by the health and ecological crises is not specific to the Z. Other segments of the population are also impacted by these two crises, well beyond young people: women, precarious and unemployed for the first time ; people particularly aware of climate issues (scientists, farmers for example) or subjected to dangerous working conditions or working in polluting sectors for the second. Changes in sensitivity and values are often porous between age groups of the same era, particularly via family transmissions. These findings demonstrate the relevance of an reading grid in terms of period effects rather than generational ones.
Workers like the others
If neither age nor time allows us to bring out the specificity of Generation Z, will the last variable, namely the social dimension, finally allow us to achieve this? It seems that the answer is once again negative and once again striking in its obviousness. In all eras, youth has not never been a homogeneous categoryparticularly in its relationship to work.
A multitude of factors are in fact likely to influence it: the level of diploma, the sector of activity, socio-economic conditions, as well as the place of residence (city/rural area/peri-urban area), the specific organizational context to the company in which the person works, but also more subjective factors (personality traits and more or less positive previous work experiences). A diversity of situations which certainly explains the ambivalence of the characteristics attributed to the “new generations”, those of yesterday as well as today.
Multiple portraits are thus hidden behind the encompassing category of “young people”, with so many different aspirations at work and particular difficulties: low-skilled young personabove all looking for a job allowing him to meet his material needs up to the elites of Harvard or Polytechnique in “quest for excellence” through higher education graduates from executive families with strong cultural capital and looking for a “passionate job”.
Without wanting to completely erase some traits which could be more marked in today’s young people than in other age groups, the thesis according to which the most recent generation forms a homogeneous cohort driven by aspirations distinct from other age groups. age in its relationship to work is not supported by any evidence. However, it persists, due to the approximate interpretations surrounding the concept of generation, but perhaps also to tenacious stereotypes about “young people”.
These findings invite us above all to see in “Young people, workers like any other”, title of a work that we recently published, and to avoid falling into the trap of generational approaches which prevent us from developing in-depth reflection on the employee experience in favor of simplistic labels. There Futures of Industry and Work Chair of the Ecole des Mines thus invites us to explore other avenues, seeking to meet the expectations of all employees.
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