Generational Change

In an increasingly complex, networked, and rapidly changing world, creativity
has taken a central role. There is enormous interest in creativity in education, business, technology research, and emerging fields such as social innovation and design. Coupled with a proliferation of popular as well as academic discourses of creativity, this situation presents researchers with complex, multidimensional challenges that cannot be addressed exclusively from the perspective of one discipline. This new global context requires a transdisciplinary exploration of creativity, particularly since the articulation, expression, and practice of creativity appear to be in flux in society as well as in academia. The networked society, generational differences, and the focus on business innovation have turned attention to collaborative, distributed forms of creativity that have only recently begun to be studied systematically.

The Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) is an international platform for agrarian knowledge production for a complex scientific problem, namely, Drought. The GCP ushered in a new form of knowledge production that reconciles both the upstream laboratorial research and its downstream delivery at the farmer's field. This paper aims at understanding the knowledge production process of the GCP. More precisely, it explores the following three research questions: how three processes such as research partnership, transdisciplinary and inclusion of end-user in research manifested within the knowledge production process of the GCP drought-tolerant rice research; what type of knowledge production emerged within the GCP drought-tolerant rice research; and what implications can be discerned for agricultural research and development. Through a qualitative case study method, this paper explores empirically the case of GCP drought-tolerant rice research in the Indian context to elucidate the knowledge production process of GCP to sketch a theoretical as well as a practical position on the agrarian knowledge production discourse. This paper argues that a hybrid knowledge production discourse has emerged within the GCP rice research that has elements from different knowledge production paradigms. Further, this paper also illustrates the implications of such hybrid knowledge production discourse for agricultural research and development.

This article examines the insinuation of therapeutic culture into everyday life from the vantage point of a qualitative cross-generational study of economically marginalized young women and their mothers. Against dominant assessments of therapeutic culture — as representing cultural decline, social regulation or transformation — we draw on interview narratives to analyse its practical and situated effects. We argue that desires for disclosure and open communication are not trivial or narcissistic and instead interpret them as productive emotional strategies for managing difficult circumstances, and for engendering a sense of competence and possibility.Thus a concern with`talkingthings through' is neither ineffectual nor adequately understood as a manifestation of an ahistorical feminine alignment with emotions and interior life. While we do not dismiss regulatory aspects of therapeutic culture, our analysis offers an alternative and empirically based account of the ways cultural imperatives are enacted across generations.

Human creativity shapes the future. The future comes into being through human creativity, and human beings are only beginning to understand how they are creating the future. The creativity of the modern age led to tremendous progress in science and technology, and to rapid social change. The very forces that led to progress are now viewed as contributing to the great problems currently facing humanity, whether environmental, economic, or social. Creativity and innovation are drivers of the economy, and there is an increasing awareness of the importance of creativity. Creativity is central to futures visioning processes and to scenario planning. But there is also debate and questioning about how creativity is being used, what kind of futures are being created, to what ends, and by whom.

It has been widely suggested that the March 2011 NATO intervention in Libya is evidence of a new international norm that has emerged as a consequence of advocacy of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle. Before this assessment solidifies into conventional wisdom, we propose an alternative reading: that the policies that led to the Libya intervention, particularly in the United States, were also driven by a generation of foreign policy elites who used the failures of the 1990s as a set of ‘formative experiences’ that provided shortcut comparisons to springboard the Libya intervention in 2011. Yet
the substantive normative basis for these elites’ claims are based on norms and practices that have been around for some time, suggesting that humanitarian intervention is something states may choose to do under certain circumstances, but are under no obligation to do. In short, it is a permissive norm invoked at the discretion of foreign policy elites as a way to justify or enable policies that they see to be in their states’ interests.

Today, about 50 % of the population in Sweden has access to a second home through their family. We are now, and in the coming years, entering a time of changes in usage and ownership for many second homes. This could result in outcomes like fragmented ownership, conflicts between legal and perceived rights of use and issues around management, succession or sale that affect maintenance and usage of the second home. The reason for this is an assumed increase of generational changes and shared usage and ownership of second homes following the boom of second homes in the 1960s and 70s and the increased average age of the owners. The aim of this paper is to start to analyse second home users’ enactment, which includes their thinking, feeling and acting, of their second home in relation to existing or future shared usage/ownership and generational changes at the second home. In order to discuss this we ask: How is the situation with shared usage of second homes and the intersection of generations at second homes experienced and described in society and among second home users? Three different materials are used: a questionnaire survey of second home users, interviews with second home users and media texts. The motive for the research is the idea that the second home is a place for the family that provides a sense of place, home, identity and continuity. The emotional, social, functional and economic meanings given to these places make them potentially problematic to manage and share within a family and through generations. In order to develop our analytical framework for understanding this, we will build on geographical works on farm property, enactment, emotional relations, transgenerational family practices and a life course perspective. The three analysed materials show that second home usage within families and over generations is common and wanted but also filled with wishes and difficulties. This paper only scratches the surface of these issues and we see a need for further exploration and analysis of the emotional, social and material values and relations to second homes, and the users’ approaches regarding this. Our long-term approach in coming studies will provide insights into the complex situations where decisions are made regarding the future of second homes as well as increase our understanding of settlement and living patterns in Sweden in the coming years.

This study investigates how the tenor of the political climate during a person's youth affects his or her attitudes towards immigration in adulthood. We analyze why cohorts formulate distinct patterns in attitudes towards immigration through a collective process of political socialization during the formative years. The theoretical arguments are tested using hierarchical age-period-cohort modelling across twelve cohorts in nine European countries using micro attitudinal data (2002-2016) integrated with historical macro political data. We find that contextual exposure to principles of equality and tradition in the formative political climate are central to the formulation of a person's attitudes towards immigration later in life. While the prevalence of the principle of equality affects immigration attitudes in adulthood positively, the principle of tradition does so negatively. The findings imply that even subtle and cyclical shifts in national politics affect the political orientations of those undergoing the process of political socialization.