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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 children’s 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 children’s 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 children’s 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 children’s well-being (cf. Hauser et al. 1997; Gasper 2004; Manderson 2005). In academic research, and in order to gain valid 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 children’s 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, and measures (Lister 2004, pp. 3–8). Concepts operate at a fairly general level, and they provide the framework within which definitions (of concepts) and measurements (operationalizations of definitions) are then developed. Definitions (and therefore also measures) mediate concepts in the sense that explanations 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 conceptual 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. 6–7), 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 children’s 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 children’s 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 information about the status of children, as well as the implementation of this information in 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 children’s 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, multidisciplinary childhood studies (see also Jens Qvortrup’s chapter in this handbook; Chap. 22, “Sociology: Societal Structure, Development of Childhood, and the Well-Being of Children”). The guiding vision is an understanding of children as social beings which, once fully developed, would need to be integrated with compatible notions originating in other disciplines (psychology, economics, biology, 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 particular 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, implies intergenerationality, in that children are constituted specifically as children primarily (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 framework for researching childhood and children’s well-being. Arguably then, the framework for an adequate study of children and childhood (and thus, by way of derivation, children’s 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.

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. Children’s 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 children’s (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 concept at the same analytical level as concepts such as class, gender, and “race”/ethnicity (see Jens Qvortrup’s chapter in this handbook; Chap. 22, “Sociology: Societal Structure, 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 multidisciplinary childhood studies, different disciplines and research fields, such as sociology, 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 of children’s 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,” and not as appendices or attachments to parents, families, schools, or other institutions (e.g., Qvortrup 1987; Alanen 1988; James and Prout 1990). The discrimination of children in scientific knowledge would end by researchers including children’s 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 children’s 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, qualitative 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 children’s well-being includes recognizing and respecting children’s 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 children’s “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 1970s–1980s 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 historically formed cultural constructs. Therefore, the approach underlines the political nature 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 children’s everyday reality, as images, beliefs, and attitudes have been incorporated 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 children’s everyday life and experiences. Foucault, Deleuze, and Donzelot are important sources of theoretical inspiration for followers of this approach. Useful methods for deconstruction include discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and various other text analytical methods.

The third main form of sociological approaches to childhood is (3) the structural approach. Here, childhood is taken as the unit of analysis and may be understood as a 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 as a 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 operating analysis 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 Qvortrup’s 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 children’s 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 country’s 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 conceptualizing 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 “made” into “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 childhood begins to take shape. The primary focus in research with a relational approach is on the generational practices, specifically the (relational) practices within which children co-construct themselves as “children” as occupiers of a particular generational position, in relation to a non-child category (or categories) of agents (see, e.g., Alanen 2001, 2009). The advantage in studying children’s 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 “generationing” processes 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 aspect in children’s 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 (children’s 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).

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 1857–1861): “Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves” (Marx 1993, p. 77)). For example, Mützel and Fuhse (2010) give an account of one specific sort of relational approach – the “New York School” – and claim that this school (together with its “transatlantic bridge building”) now presents the most important and innovative theoretical approach in today’s 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. 2–8); 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 of the 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 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 sociology (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 has been newly published in English (Donati 2011). See also Margaret Archer’s introduction to Donati’s sociology: Archer (2010)). Germany (Fuhse and Mützel 2010) and France (Vautier 2008) can also boast research groups developing their brands of relational sociology. The Canadian-based journal Nouvelles perspectives en sciences sociales: revue international de systémique complexe et d’études relationelles published a special issue on French-Canadian relational sociology in 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 “spontaneous” 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 experience and “treats the properties attached to agents – occupation, age, sex, qualifications - as forces independent of the relationship within which they “act”” (Bourdieu 1984, 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. 3–4). Therefore, it is easier to treat social facts as things or as persons than it is to treat them as relations (Bourdieu 1994, pp. 189–190).

The methodological alternative that Bourdieu advocates and which he identifies 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” (Wacquant 1992, pp. 15–19).

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 emergentist understanding 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 theory’s 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 collaboration 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).

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 (1987–1992) 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 understanding 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 “generation,” 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 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 (1987–1992), assembled and organized to study the characteristic social features of childhood across a number of Western societies. The core idea in the project’s 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 interrelationships, in terms of exchange, solidarity, conflict, or “gaps” in mutual understanding. Moreover, by identifying people as members of particular generations, 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 succession, 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).

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 Mannheim’s 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 acknowledges 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 formation 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, 302–312; Corsten 1999, pp. 253–255).

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. 9–10; cf. Mannheim 1952/1928, pp. 292–308). (For criticisms directed at Mannheim’s theory, among them the assumptions on youth and socialization on which he relies, see Pilcher (1995, pp. 23–25)).

For decades after the publication of his seminal essay (in 1928), there was not much treatment of the subject in sociology. Later, Mannheim’s thinking did evoke some response but mainly 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 Mannheim’s theory of generations and utilized it in their research. In this activity, scholars clarified some of the confusion found in earlier usages (including Mannheim’s) of “generation” and developed precise distinctions and conceptualizations useful for the empirical aims of research. These include particularly 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 been made 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. 22–25) 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. 16–30). 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. 249–250)).

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, Mannheim’s 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 the obvious fresh cohort entering social life and, therefore, also capable of sharing experiences 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 research. One plausible explanation for this curious omission lurks in Ryder’s article (1965, pp. 851–852) 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 children 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 sociology 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 Mannheim’s work.

There is however more to discover – and rediscover – in “generation,” by going beyond the line of analysis that has stemmed from Mannheim’s 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 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: children’s agency.

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 project’s 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; also Alanen 1992, pp. 64–71); 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 social ordering 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 people’s 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 its preference for ethnographic research with children, and sensitivity to children’s 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 theoretically and methodologically, and put into empirical use, promises to help sociologists to understand and account for the interconnections between childhood’s 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 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 (“intersectionality”) 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 children’s 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 project’s 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 children’s 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 external, 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 the sense that what one category is dependent on its relation to the other, and the existence of one necessarily presupposes the other (Sayer 1992, pp. 89–90; 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 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 of a 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 this in 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. 89–91) 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. 54–61). 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 problematic 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 relations between 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 undifferentiated, homogeneous, and general categories, thereby inviting criticism of false universalism 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. 61–64).

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 age moves the analysis close to cohort-based (statistical) generational analysis. In the kind of structural approach to generational analysis that Jens Qvortrup has advocated, 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, Qvortrup’s approach could be seen as a modification of Weberian class analysis or, closer to the study of childhood, a modification of Karl Mannheim’s 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 Oldman’s thought-provoking framing of children’s activities in the Children as a Social Phenomenon book Childhood Matters (Oldman 1994). Oldman aims to show how in capitalist societies the relations between the (generational) classes of children and adults have become organized as economic relations. The suggestion is 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’ labor (Oldman 1994, pp. 43–47). 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 that articulates 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. 55–58).

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 the constitutive principle in the social ordering, and organizing, of child-adult relations in 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 generational 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 social world, the (relational) positions that define “childness” in each historical time-space, and the social (relational) practices (cf. Connell 1987) in which the positions constitutive 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., Bühler-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.

7 Toward a Relational Sociology of Childhood

One of Bourdieu’s central goals in developing his theoretical approach was to assist in overcoming sociology’s 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 existing polarity between (1) micro-sociologies of children that focus their analysis 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 the social structures or a structure in its own right. Bourdieu’s 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 Bourdieu’s 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 internally related, in the sense that one category (such as “children”) cannot exist without the other, and the socially constructed meaning of one category is dependent on the meaning of the other category.

The following section expands on Bourdieu’s 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.”

7.1 A Sociology of Fields

Instead of affirming that the ontological priority lies with structure or with actors, the collective or the individual, Bourdieu’s sociology affirms the primacy of social relations (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 Bourdieu’s 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 that is 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 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 is made 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. 97–98)

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 increasingly to replace the polysemantic concept of structure that he used in earlier texts (Reed-Danahay 2004, p. 133). Subsequently, field gains an increasingly central place in Bourdieu’s theoretical system. He continued to refine his conceptual tools throughout his career in empirical studies, with the analytical weight of field increasing 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 Bourdieu’s 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. 72–73), giving the concept the analytical meaning that the concept retained in his later, distinctly relational theory.

Bourdieu’s 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 Bourdieu’s 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 are valued and held legitimate in the field. Each field has its own rules, or logic, and 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.

Bourdieu’s 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 dominance 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 differentiation, 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 Bourdieu’s 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. Bernard Lahire (2001, pp. 32–37) follows Bourdieu in his contention that the existence of a field presupposes illusion, that is, that there exist a sufficient number of 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. 98–99)

The systemic nature of Bourdieu’s 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. 24–26) 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. 120–121). 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 analysis (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 the concepts of field and capital form Bourdieu’s 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 Bourdieu intends 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)).

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

The significance of family in Bourdieu’s theorizing and in his studies (especially Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1984) stems from his interest in understanding the social mechanisms by which social inequalities are reproduced. In modern societies, family, alongside education, is a central reproductive mechanism. Family, therefore, appears in Bourdieu’s theorizing in several contexts: Family appears as a field; it may also be a component of habitus; family may also provide the members of a family group with resources – social capital – that they can convert 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 is presented.

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. 68–69; 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. Büchner and Brake (2006, pp. 25–26), in their study on the intergenerational transmission 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 domain separates 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 Bourdieu’s 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 families, and in people’s 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. 24–25; Lenoir 2008, pp. 39–40). 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. 67–69).

Remi Lenoir (1991, 1992, 2003) has extensively analyzed this historical process of the birth and development – the long durée – of the family field in France, as it has 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 Lenoir’s 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 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 family habitus (Bourdieu 1998, pp. 66–67; Lenoir 2008, p. 34). The daily work that goes into 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 to know what the family is” confirms the success of the social work (Durkheim) (consisting of both the “private” work of families and the “public” work of state and other agents) that has been implemented in constructing the institution of the family, which is also manifest on the level of public discourses mobilized to support the vision of a thoroughly familialized world (Lenoir 1991, pp. 781–782).

Thus, when considered as a social field, the family is a space structured by positions that are defined in and by the struggles and the specific interests mobilized in these struggles by a broad ensemble of agents, groups, and institutions, often following divergent logics (Dandurand and Ouellette 1995, p. 104; Lenoir 2003; 2008). It is worth pointing out that family as a social field does not only refer to the broad societal (macro-)space studied by, for example, Lenoir and Dandurand and Ouellette; on the contrary, Bourdieu (1998, pp. 68–69) reminds us that any family group (which may be understood as a subfield of the broader family field) also “tends to function as a field, with their physical, economic and, above all, symbolic power relations” (linked, e.g., to the volume and structure of the capital possessed by each member), “and its struggles to hold on to and transform these power relations.” The key struggles (or the “game”) in the broad family field concern what defines “the family” or, in Bourdieu’s terms, the species of capital specific to the family and who are well positioned to define it and have their definition accepted as legitimate. Yet, this structure is always at stake in the struggles within the family field; therefore, there is never any guarantee of there being unanimity at any time on what the legitimate representation of “the family” is or should be.

Bourdieu points clearly to what the family’s specific capital may consist of when he writes on the socially arbitrary but naturalized “family,” in contemporary societies:

In order for this reality called “family” to be possible, certain social conditions that are in no way universal have to be fulfilled. They are, in any case, by no means uniformly distributed. In short, the family in its legitimate definition is a privilege instituted into a universal norm: de facto privilege that implies a symbolic privilege – the privilege of comme il faut, conforming to the norm, and therefore enjoying a symbolic profit of normality [emphasis by LA]. Those who have the privilege of having a “normal” family are able to demand the same of everyone without having to raise the question of the conditions (a certain income, living space, etc.) of universal access to what they demand universally. … This privilege is, in reality, one of the major conditions of the accumulation and transmission of economic, cultural and symbolic privileges. (Bourdieu 1998, p. 69)

The so-called “nuclear” family is the prototypical normal family at the core of family practices in the contemporary world (Uhlmann 2006, p. 9); it acts as a realized category by being both a model of reality (in the sense that it reflects the general practice) and a model for reality, meaning that it becomes a prescription that members of society follow. As a realized category, the nuclear family forms “a ‘gestalt’ which incorporates many specific cognitive models, such as the division of labour within the family group, the convergence of social and biological parenthood, and the dependency of children on parents” (Uhlmann 2006, pp. 46–47). These are some of the doxic aspects of the family which are taken for granted and commonly experienced as universal. The concept of doxa broadly refers to the misrecognition of forms of social arbitrariness that engenders the unformulated, nondiscursive, but internalized and practical recognition of that same social arbitrariness. It contributes to its reproduction in social institutions, structures, and relations as well as in minds and bodies, expectations, and behavior (Deer 2008, p. 119). Moreover, the transparency of normalcy, that is, the fact that the family passes unnoticed and remains uninterrogated by public opinion, is – as Bourdieu (see above) has pointed out – part of the privileged position it has acquired: “the right to question and not to be questioned, the authority to contemplate others but not to be contemplated” (Uhlmann 2006, p. 47). Therefore, “having a normal family” has the potentiality of being a privilege that has the status of being for their possessors valuable cultural capital and, moreover, symbolic capital.

This chapter has sought to clear some conceptual ground for developing a relational sociology of childhood. The discussion arose from the idea that childhood is a fundamentally relational phenomenon and that, therefore, the study of children and childhood, and the circumstances of children’s lives, necessitates a social ontology that is consistently relational. The movement within childhood studies toward a relational conceptualization of children and childhood has been described, as well as the advance of relational sociologies elsewhere, exemplified by Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. These developments additionally provide conceptual and methodological tools for developing a reasoned conception of intergenerationality as well as an ontologically and epistemologically secured foundation for intergenerational studies.