Generational Change

Las diferencias existentes entre generaciones van más allá que las derivadas de la propia edad y los estereotipos; los cambios tecnológicos o las jerarquías, como la de alumno-profesor, crean una brecha que se produce con el cambio social, cuando los jóvenes adquieren una visión diferente del mundo de la que tienen sus mayores que se mantiene durante toda su vida, generando así distancias en el entendimiento entre los grupos coetáneos, también conocidas como brechas. En la presente investigación se pretende realizar una visualización de las  brechas, a través de la aplicación de la teoría del Formal Concept Analysis, para determinar la cercanía y entendimiento entre los actores de dos grupos generacionales (profesores y alumnos) a partir de sus actividades en el contexto educativo de una Universidad pública seleccionada, partiendo de las brechas generacional, cognitiva y digital.

The first part of the report maps the phenomenon of "generational change" in the Province of Treviso in 2005: the datas shows a very negative potential. In the ownership structure of the firms, there are nearly 9,000 positions held by persons with more than 70 years, over 16,000 positions between 60 and 70 years, over 29.000 positions between 50 and 60 years. From the legal point of view, the problem is greater in the individual firms. From the territorial point of view, the systems most affected seem to be the areas of Treviso and Conegliano. Regarding the municipalities, the most affected are Treviso, Montebelluna, Conegliano and Castelfranco Veneto. From a sectorial perspective the activity most affected is certainly agriculture. As for the female component, the report finds that the issue seems more projected over the medium-long term than in the short term. The second part of the report analyses the patrimonial, contractual and relational aspects, and concludes by outlining some strategies for solving the problem, distinguishing between public operators, for which it suggests screening services and guidance, and private operators, which should instead support entrepreneurs about the corporate bodies and the financial setting.

Der Aufsatz untersucht, wie die Zeitgenossen die Angebote der mit neuen Medien und Verbreitungsformen verbundenen großstädtischen Massenkultur um 1900 wahrnahmen, wie sie sie einordneten und bewerteten. Die zentrale These lautet, dass eine Veränderung in Deutschland großes Unbehagen erzeugte: Die mit dem Übergang in die Mediengesellschaft außerordentlich erhöhte Zugänglichkeit von  Wissen, und zwar insbesondere die neuartige Sichtbarkeit von Wissen im öffentlichen Raum. Sie forderte die tradierte Ordnung der Generationen heraus, in der eine kontrollierte und regulierte Weitergabe ausgewählten Wissens an die nachwachsende Generation vorgesehen war.  Nun sahen sich viele Erwachsene einer "Disziplinlosigkeit" der Wissenstransfers gegenüber, für die sie oft die mediale Populärkultur verantwortlich machten.

Presentation on Youth, Adulthood and Social Integration in the DR Congo on the occasion of an expert group meeting of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Inclusive Social Development, organized by the Doha International Family Institute (DIFI) in collaboration with the International Federation for Family Development (IFFD).

This paper examines the differing perspectives of wartime and post-war generations. It discusses the widely spread statement ”Those who did not live during the Nazi period should not be allowed to make judgments“ in its moral and ethical consequences. It argues for Christian theologians to face failure and guilt in their history in order to find ways of repentance for church and theology.

Human resources in businesses consist of different generations. Today, an average of four generations of Baby Boomers, X, Y and Z generations, work in the same workplace. There is also the Silent generation, which is the first generation that lived before these generations. The silent generation is no longer involved in working life as of their age. It is getting harder day by day to create attractive and satisfying environments for employees of different generations in workplaces. When the related literature is examined, there are the generations that are present in the working life, especially the X, Y and Z generations. However, there are not many studies on the Alpha generation, which is a generation that has not yet entered the business life. The aim of this research is to provide information about the generations currently in business life and to provide a foresight about the Alpha generation that will take place in business life in the future. When the studies on the concept of generation in the literature are examined it is seen that the generations before the Alpha generation are mainly investigated. Especially in our country, the fact that there is no study that examines the effects of the Alpha generation on the future work life by providing information about the future reveals the importance of this research. In addition, this study contains important findings for both researchers and practitioners.

Emotional intelligence is at the heart of our research. Our aim was to examine the differences that exist between generations, based on the views of their representatives. In the theoretical portion we dealt with defining emotional intelligence and presenting it from the leaders' aspect. Finally, each generation is introduced. In our paper we set up 2 hypotheses, which are cross-tabulated and / or analyzed with the help of related statistical methods. In the end, both our hypotheses proved to be true. This article contains 2 figures and 2 tables. Our paper ends with a section on conclusions, in which we summarize our research, results and outline our findings.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has engineered a massive regression to communist orthodoxy, resurrecting ideological indoctrination, tightening control of the media and cracking down on freedom of speech. The sharp swing to the left is surprising and has provoked many in the West to confront and contain what seems to be a renewed communist threat. Although ensuring the regime’s survivability is the ultimate motive, the rationale of Xi’s left turn cannot be logically derived from the
socio-economic changes on the ground. It is more of a generational phenomenon associated with Xi and his generational cohort. In the longer run, it may lack sustaining power because of the widening generational gaps in the Chinese society.

Much has been said about Filipino millennials. Born in the 1980s and 1990s, they are often described in passionate terms: they can seize the day, pursue their dreams, and travel the world. And yet they can also be self-entitled and narcissistic. How true are these characteristics? Drawing from the empirical work of 17 scholars from around the country, this collection presents an alternative view. Millennials belong to a fragmented generation whose dreams, abilities, and dispositions need to be understood in context. An agenda-setting collection, this will be useful for researchers and practitioners who wish to understand the state of the youth and the emergence of new generations.

Update: Awarded Best Book in the Social Sciences, National Book Awards 2022.

The Evolution of the Teenager research carried out on behalf of NCS (National Citizen Service)
explores important generational shifts
in teenagers’ attitudes towards career
aspirations and expectations of the workplace.
Uncovering insights into each of the generations from
WW1 to the present day, the report is the first of its kind
to map trends in this way. The results collated from the
research clearly show how the attitudes of the different
generations have been shaped by the major events and
developments of their age.

Focusing on the formation of ethnic self-identities during adolescence, this paper examines the psychosocial adaptation of children of immigrants from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The data are drawn from the CILS survey carried out in the San Diego and Miami metropolitan areas of over 5,000 children of immigrants attending the 8th and 9th grades in local schools. The sample is evenly split by gender and nativity (half are U.S.-born, half foreign-born). The results show major differences in their patterns of ethnic self-identification, both between and within groups from diverse national origins. Instead of a uniform assimilative path, we found segmented paths to identity formation. Detailed social portraits are sketched for each ethnic identity type. Multivariate analyses then explore the determinants of assimilative and dissimilative ethnic self-identities, and of other aspects of psychosocial adaptation such as self-esteem, depressive affect, and parent-child conflict, controlling for gender, socioeconomic status, and national origin. The theoretical and practical implications of these results – especially the effects of acculturation, discrimination, location and ethnic density of schools, parental socialization and family context, upon the psychosocial adaptation of children of recent immigrants to the United States – are discussed.

This proceeding analyses strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities offered by three technology-using classes, namely Offline Learning Class, Virtual Learning Class, and Blended Learning Class. It concludes with  a proper strategy—namely, integration strategy— deduced out of the SWO analysis that can be best implemented in schools.

This study was conducted to determine leadership qualities that new generational business entrepreneurs believe lead the way to resolving economic problems faced by entrepreneurial business leaders through innovative practices.  The purpose of the study was to examine the lived experiences of small business owners of start-ups from various generational groups and their implementation of innovative practices, identification of leadership styles and attributes they believe contribute to innovative effectiveness and leadership styles that business owners believe reflect success and to identify obstacles believed to hinder success.  A qualitative research method and phenomenological design was used for data collection and analysis to examine entrepreneurial leaders lived experiences.  Six major themes emerged from the data collection and analysis process:  Technology, Self-Initiation, Motivation, Generation X, Baby Boomers, and Innovation.  The growing number of generations in the workforce has been due in part to a struggling economy. According to Business Wire, new business entrepreneurs will lead the way in solving the economy’s problems. A strong cadre of capable, innovative entrepreneurs will be critical to the repair and future prosperity of our economy.  Vital for these new business leaders will be finding creative and innovative ways to address generational diversity.

In face of the epochal and lasting changes with regard to earth’s ecosystem, among other things, both the modern understanding of an open future and the intergenerational fabric of society is put into question—and with it our understanding of education. By assessing the basic problem of any emergency pedagogy for the endangered future, this paper is pointing out that these developments will have to lead to a fundamentally different way of thinking about education. Especially in view of the urgency needed because of the limited time left to prevent the worst consequences of human impact on our habitat, it is questionable whether the time frame of education and the modern emphasis on emancipation can be fitted into that.

For many indigenous peoples, an ongoing vital relationship to their ancestors, extending back generations, forms a central anchor for personal identity. This larger sense of self extends beyond the modern nuclear family unit, into a multi-generational awareness of connections, patterns, and stories, woven into their relationship with land and cosmos.  Through dreams, sacred intention and sacred action, forgotten family stories can be recovered from the mists.  Knowing the multi-generational stories enables one to see one’s life patterns in an expanded context.  Ancestral stories offer a perspective that helps us recognize both positive resources as well as unconscious dysfunctional patterns bequeathed to us from the past. Ancestral dreams bring formative family events of striking intensity into the dreamer’s present awareness.

            Ancestral dreams serve the process of remembrance and honoring the ancestors in multiple ways.  They assist in reestablishing familial relationships severed by death, mending and extending our relationships with those who have gone before us.  Ancestral dreams may heal specific “places of break” within the multi-generational family systems, addressing tragedies and traumas suffered by ancestors that haunt subsequent generations.  Third, ancestral dreams serve a revitalizing and illuminating function, connecting us more consciously to the current of energy from which we have descended—a current that is potent, continuous and alive.  Fourth, dreams of living ancestors reach forward, preparing us to accompany our elders through major events on the horizon of our shared lifespan, especially transition through death to the other world.  The author shares personal examples of all four types of ancestral dreams.

За последние два века исследователями описано и систематизировано немало разнообразных закономерностей социального, политического и экономического развития человеческих обществ. Однако единая картина закономерностей социально-исторической динамики так и не сложилась. Причиной является исключительная разнородность результатов и отсутствие той единой точки отсчета, которая позволяет представить разнородные разработки как сегменты обширной мозаики, обладающей четкой единой структурой. Фактически в распоряжении исследователей имеется масса описаний и теорий―от статистических рядов отдельных параметров до универсалистских концепций эволюции всего человечества, от разнообразных "теорий среднего уровня" до обзоров макрозакономерностей―но они не дают единой закономерной картины социально-исторического развития.
Цель предлагаемой работы―показать не просто единую, но полную картину основных процессов социально-исторического развития во всей ее ошеломляющей целостности. Для этого последовательно реконструируется вся система закономерностей социальной эволюции―от среднесрочных процессов длительностью в несколько лет до вековых циклов локальных цивилизаций. Одни из этих закономерностей давно известны, другие впервые описаны в настоящем исследовании, но все они являются составными частями той удивительной цивилизационной динамики, которая разворачивается на Земле последние 10000 лет. Основная особенность предлагаемой картины―уточнение и сведение в единую систему всех основных ныне известных закономерностей пространственно-временного и качественного развития человеческих обществ―от статистических закономерностей до фундаментальных законов, включающих более простые законы и закономерности на правах частных случаев. ПРИМЕЧАНИЕ. Таблица 2 на стр.16 содержит ошибки, однако они не влияют на выводы, полученные с помощью анализа этой таблицы.

Within the socialist society project, the image of youth was associated with the ideal of creative power. The youth represented the new socialist people, not burdened with the past and the remnants of bourgeois ideology. From the early 1950's, it was a group attracting an enormous interest of the communist ideologues on which hopes were pinned and on which ideas of completing the future socialist society were projected. This idea was applied even more intensively in the 1960's, when the new generation grew up that had been brought up in the post-war period, largely in the people's democratic and socialist enviroment.
The intellectual world of the young generation did not always fully match the expectations of the communist establishment, which stimulated both intraParty and social discussions. I am focusing on defining the Czechoslovak young generation in terms of the generational structure of Czech society in the post-war period, trying to determine the possibilities and limits of thinking about the period 1963-1967 as a generational break. I attempt to outline the expectations and horizons of thought in relation to the socialist project in a group of young people who did not have experience of the economic crisis and the Second World War. These findings will then be confronted with historically dominant discourses about youth, both in the enviroment in the Communist Party and in the epxert enviroment of studies of the youth as a specific group within the socialist society.

Obraz mládí byl v rámci projektu socialistické společnosti spojován s ideálem tvořivé síly. Mládež představovala nového socialistického člověka, nezatíženého minulostí a pozůstatky buržoazní ideologie. Již od počátku padesátých let byla skupinou přitahující eminentní zájem komunistických ideologů, do které byly vkládány naděje a projektovány představy dovršení budoucí socialistické společnosti. Ještě intenzivněji tato představa působila v letech šedesátých, kdy dorůstala nová generace vychovaná v poválečném období a to z velké části dokonce jen v prostředí lidovědemokratickém a socialistickém.
Myšlenkový svět mladé generace ne vždy plně odpovídal očekáváním komunistického establishmentu, což stimulovalo jak vnitrostranickou, tak celospolečenskou diskusi. Ve svém příspěvku bych se rád zaměřil na zasazení československé mladé generace z hlediska generační struktury české společnosti v poválečném období, přičemž se pokusím stanovit možnosti a limity uvažování o období přibližně 1963-1967 jako o generačním zlomu. Pokusím se nejdříve načrtnout očekávání a myšlenkové horizonty ve vztahu k socialistickému projektu ve skupině mladých, kteří nedisponovali bezprostřední zkušeností hospodářské krize a druhé světové války. Tato zjištění budu následně konfrontovat s dobově dominantními diskursy o mládeži a to jak v prostředí komunistické strany, tak v expertním prostředí výzkumů mládeže jako specifické skupiny v rámci socialistické společnosti.

در بخش نخست این مقاله به زمینه‌های بازآفرینی و نیز فرض‌های محتمل در بروز شکلی از بدکرداری سیاسی پرداخته شد که می‌توان آنرا ماکیاولیسم خمینی‌مآب نامید. این پاره به بازاندیشی برخی از مفاهیم در اندیشه سیاسی ماکیاولی می‌پردازد و نمونه‌های بدفهمی و مسخ آنرا برمی‌سنجد و در پایان به اهمیت آفرینش یا تعمیق گونه‌ای ایمان‌ورزی به آرمان "خیر جمعی" و نیز بایستگی پاسداشت از واپسین گنجینه ایمانی ایرانیان اشاره می‌کند.

This paper presents a method for studying age-period-cohort effects in a comparative context where repeated cross-sectional data are available covering a suitably long period of time. The method consists in the application of multi-level models with country as the higher level of analysis and random coefficients to model variables which vary at the country-level. Additionally, the application of generalized additivemodels (GAMs) and generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) provides robust empirical tests of cohort categorizations applied in this and previous studies to estimate otherwise collinear effects. To illustrate the method, I derive and test the theory that generationswill be differentiated in their patterns of participation based on the ascendancy of certain repertoires in the era of their political socialization.

The various demographic generations have been described at large in the media, we all know the babyboomers; the millennials (1980-2000 born) are now the focus of attention, generation Z is next. Correlations within generations are observed, sometimes mistakenly seen as causalities, and sometimes very obvious causalities are overlooked. In this essay I point at the change in childbirth practices and notably Ceasarean (C-section) birthing as a potential factor in the behavior of the millennial generation. Especially the rich in the West have increasingly used, for various reasons, C-section and epidural and spinal anesthesia , and I posit that  in the millennial generation the effects on character, health and attitude may become more visible. What is now described as typical millennial traits like lack of initiative and fighting power might be typical for C-section born. Painless birthing might have consequences we didn’t anticipate.

South Africa’s 1996 Constitution ushered in a democratic regime that brought new freedoms and rights and greatly expanded opportunities for political participation. In 1998, South Africa also implemented a new school curriculum intended, among other things, to promote democratic and other constitutional values. At the same time, South Africa has undergone rapid demographic change as growing proportions of young people enter the electorate with no working memory of apartheid. Given our knowledge of post-regime change shifts in popular attitudes in post-war Europe and Japan, theories of socialisation and democratic habituation would lead us to expect significant pro-democratic shifts in South Africa’s political culture, especially amongst the youngest generation, who are popularly known in South Africa as the ‘Born Frees.’ Against these expectations, however, survey evidence indicates that the post-apartheid generation is less committed to democracy than their parents or grandparents.

Our study investigates the role of infrastructures in shaping online news usage by contrasting use patterns of two social groups—millennials and boomers—that are specifically located in news infrastructures. Typically based on self-reported data, popular press and academics tend to highlight the generational gap in news usage and link it to divergence in values and preferences of the two age cohorts. In contrast, we conduct relational analyses of shared usage obtained from passively metered usage data across a vast range of online news outlets for millennials and boomers. We compare each cohort's usage networks comprising various types of news websites. Our analyses reveal a smaller-than-commonly-assumed generational gap in online news usage, with characteristics that manifest the multifarious E Equal contributors (names in alphabetical order).

Artikel ini menawarkan ide-ide kritis untuk mengembangkan kajian kepemudaan di Indonesia.
Secara spesifik, ide-ide ini difokuskan pada agenda teoritis dan praktis yang relevan dengan
kondisi kontemporer pemuda di Indonesia. Pemuda sebagai subjek studi menempati posisi
ambigu dalam konstelasi produksi pengetahuan. Pemuda dianggap penting dan krusial sebagai
sebagai subjek bagi masa depan bangsa. Di sisi yang lain, pemuda sebagai subjek juga berada
dalam posisi marjinal tidak hanya dalam konteks produksi pengetahuan namun juga dalam hal
pembuatan kebijakan. Kondisi ini merupakan peringatan dini bagi agen-agen sosial yang peduli
terhadap kajian kepemudaan di Indonesia. Berdasarkan refleksi kritis, observasi empiris dan studi
terhadap literatur kajian kepemudaan yang relevan, saya menawarkan agenda teoritis dan praktis
untuk mengembangkan kajian kepemudaan di Indonesia. Agenda teoritis tersebut antara lain:
menjembatani antara pendekatan transisi pemuda dan buday pemuda, pengarusutamaan konsep
kelas sosial dan kesenjangan sosial, dan pengembangan kajian kepemudaan berdasarkan konteks
Indonesia. Sedangkan agenda praktis yang ditawarkan antara lain: pengarusutamaan riset
strategis dan diseminasi kajian kepemudaan secara merata. Sebagai kesimpulan, harapan saya
semoga ide-ide dalam artikel ini dapat menjadi titik masuk bagi terwujudnya generasi muda
Indonesia yang lebih tercerahkan dan teremansipasi di masa depan.

در سال 76 خواست نسل جدید همه را غافلگیر کرد، پذیرفته شد و دولتی نیز هم جهت با تغییر و تحولات عملکرد و نهایتا تحولات تقویت شد. اما تحولات بعدی در دولت نهم و دهم در واقع نوعی مواجهه با خواست‌های نسل جدید بود و سعی داشت در خلاف جهت خواست نسل جوان حرکت کند. نهایتا دولتی روی کار آمد و عملا در آن خواست‌های نسل جدید تقریبا نادیده گرفته شد.

This paper explores practices and imaginations of space among young people in postwar Beirut. Relying on an innovative collaborative-mapping methodology, it shifts the focus from the traditional analysis of the city at war, centred on anxious urbanism, toward spatial dynamics of conflict transformation. It deploys an ethnographic approach to shed light on everyday perceptions of the urban landscape among a group of students. Their visions of space are composed along conventional tropes, comparable to Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes: images that connect temporal and spatial relationships to describe their ways of inhabiting the city. These images reveal that their experiences of space are not produced exclusively in relation to the memory of wartime topographies and politico-religious territories. Rather, they are also the result of their personal trajectories and agency. For these young people, ordinary encounters inspire a reframing of the political geography of the everyday, including renewed narratives on coexistence and strategies of circumventing the sense of spatial confinement they inherited from the war. The analysis shows that the experiences of these students stand in sharp contrast with the dominant image of unbending intergroup boundaries in postwar Lebanon. Young people's abilities to navigate, negotiate and rediscover social encounters in a complex, changing environment call attention to the transformative power of micro-situations in postwar contexts. Through highlighting their original lifestyles and ways of thinking, this paper argues that the city, far from only symbolizing and reproducing conflicts, is also the place where mundane practices and imaginations reinvent the social fabric.

This chapter attends to the question of how personal photography is practiced through and with the smartphone by the elderly. The smartphone as a net- worked multimedia device that is always at hand is at the heart of current changes not only in personal photography, but in the mediatization of our ev- eryday lives. It clearly affords new possibilities, but how those affordances are used and how different ways of engaging with the same affordances are evolving, remains to be empirically investigated. One factor of variation are different generation- and age-specific technological experiences that seem to constitute different ways of engaging with media. While considerable research has been done on younger people and their digital photographic practices, the so-called digital immigrants, have not received as much attention. Based on an empirical example that combines the analysis of text and picture, the article shows how a sixtytwo-year-old woman adopted the smartphone as her “con- stant companion” and key device for snap photography. Her modes of showing and sharing suggest that specific configurations of hardware (smartphone) and software (e.g. WhatsApp) contain various affordances that she employs for diverging needs – while her family remains the main motif and counterpart of her photo sharing practices.

"Der Beitrag basiert auf den Arbeiten eines laufenden Forschungsprojektes innerhalb des Konstanzer SFB 485 'Norm und Symbol'. Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, inwiefern eine kommunikative Grenze zwischen Generationen etabliert bzw. wie sie analysiert werden kann. Empirische Grundlage des Referates sind narrative Interviews, die mit Angehörigen der Generation der 68er, ihren Eltern und Kindern geführt wurden. Einleitend wird dem Zusammenhang von Generation und Narration nachgegangen. Es folgt die Darstellung einiger empirischer Fallbeispiele. Die Auswertung führt zur These, dass die strukturellen Brüche zwischen den Generationen sich weniger in Form von manifesten Generationskonflikten, als vielmehr in Form von divergierenden Erzählmustern der Generationen zeigen. Thematisch im Zentrum steht die jeweilige Haltung der Interviewten zum 'Werk' ihrer eigenen und vor allem der Generation der 68er. Hierbei lassen sich zwei Dimensionen unterscheiden: zum einen der 'Familientext', der sich über die Generationsgrenzen hinweg verfolgen lässt, zum anderen die Brechung dieses Textes an den Generationsgrenzen, die sich in der Variation seiner narrativen Struktur ausdrückt. Die Änderung der Plotstruktur einer Erzählung jedoch verändert grundsätzlich auch die Wertung ihrer Protagonisten und deren Werke. Es zeigen sich die Grenzen zwischen den Generationen als Grenzen ihres Erzählens. Der Referent entwirft abschließend den Versuch einer Typologie dieser teilweise versteckten, unvereinbaren Weisen des Erzählens."

Par une mise en perspective de ses apports et de ses limites actuelles, cette introduction tente d’ouvrir la voie à un renouvellement de la sociologie des inégalités entre générations. Une première partie revient sur l’émergence et l’évolu- tion du concept même de « génération » en sociologie tout au long du XXe siècle : avant d’être approchée par le prisme des « inégalités », la génération a prioritaire- ment été définie comme élément moteur du changement social et culturel, investie sous l’angle de la « conscience » dans les travaux de Mannheim, puis sous celui des « valeurs » dans les travaux des années 1950 et 1960. La seconde partie met en perspective la montée du thème des inégalités entre générations, portée par le grand retournement des années 1970 qui affecte durablement les conditions dans lesquelles les jeunes entrent sur le marché du travail. Au-delà de ces difficultés croissantes dans le champ économique, les jeunes générations semblent tenues à l’écart des positions dominantes et des leviers du changement social, ce qui nourrit les discours autour de l’existence d’une « génération sacrifiée ». Tout en soulignant l’importance des acquis de ces travaux, une troisième partie en révèle quelques limites et appelle à l’ouverture de nouveaux fronts de recherches : penser l’articula- tion entre plusieurs générations pour sortir de l’opposition entre deux générations, celle des premiers-nés du baby-boom, et celle née dans les années 1960 ; penser ensemble inégalités inter- et intragénérationnelles ; articuler inégalités sociales et solidarités familiales entre générations ; poser la question d’une éventuelle cons- cience de génération et de ses manifestations politiques. Cette introduction se termine par une présentation des articles du numéro spécial qui, sur chacun de ces fronts de recherche, soumettent de nouveaux éléments au débat scientifique.

FRENCH Abstract
Cet article se penche sur les récits du déclin économique que portent deux générations de mineurs au Katanga, en République démocratique du Congo : les retraités du géant industriel minier Gécamines et les jeunes creuseurs artisanaux. Sont analysées les « structures de sentiment » (Raymond Williams) qui caractérisent chacune de ces générations, toutes deux confrontées aux effets matériels et sociaux du déclin industriel et de la libéralisation du secteur minier qui s’en est suivie. Par ces sentiments partagés du déclin contemporain, on voit comment chaque génération vit son positionnement social et son enchevêtrement « dans le temps naissant » (Achille Mbembe). Basé sur les récits des mineurs interrogés quant à leur marginalisation dans ce contexte de libéralisation du secteur, ce travail vient brouiller les périodisations académiques qui privilégient les ruptures au détriment des continuités, entre ères précoloniale, coloniale et postcoloniale.

ENGLISH Abstract

This article looks at narratives of economic decline among two generations of mineworkers in Katanga province, DR Congo : the pensioners of the industrial mining giant, Gécamines, and creuseurs, young men working as artisanal diggers. The author analyzes the “structures of feeling” informing the lives of individuals in these two generations of mineworkers as each deals with the material and social effects of industrial decline and the subsequent liberalization of the mining sector in Congo. He shows that the shared thoughts and sentiments of contemporary decline reflect how individuals in each mineworker generation experience their social emplacement and “entanglement in time” (Achille Mbembe). Based on his informants’narratives of marginalization that come in the wake of the liberalization of mining sector, the author argues that social decline in Congo confounds the strict scholarly framings of periodicity that foreground rupture – rather than continuity – between the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial eras.