Abstract
Student and youth groups are often vanguard actors in turbulent times. This article proposes that when they are part of broader social movements, they can introduce strong age-cohort influences in a movement’s development. These influences derive from the balance between youths and adults in a movement and their interrelationships, especially over the long term when demands remain unanswered by the state. Other influences include resource availability, which tends to cluster with older generations, tactical specialization according to age cohorts, and the tendency of groups with younger members to be willing to take greater risks, be more passionate in their demands, and more militant in their tactics. In this report, we identified several empirically recognized cognitive dimensions relevant to youthful participation: (1) identity search, (2) risk taking, (3) emotionality, and (4) cognitive triggering. These cognitive factors of late adolescence and early adulthood can energize a movement when young cohorts participate but also run the risk of alienating older members and public opinion. We discussed how mass movements for political and/or cultural change are frequently intergenerational and how intergenerational relations can mitigate the inward-turning and militant tendencies of young adults. In broad movements for social change, these relations can create a division of labor in which students are the vanguard actors and the older members mobilize the social and material resources available to them. Under other conditions, youth and student groups wield a two-edged sword with the capability of energizing a movement or alienating older cohorts of militants and public opinion.
Highlights
Relevant to the social science of youth cultures and subcultures is their role in vanguard movements of social change
This article is a theoretical essay whose goal is to come to terms with the generational dimension by identifying key age-related processes that operate in the big social movements of our era
It is fair to say that in social movement research youth and age-cohorts as determinant factors have not been accorded central theoretical roles. This is puzzling because many of the major movements comprising the foundational literature of the social movements field today have generational relations and the role of younger activists at their core: in the civil rights movement [8,9,10,11], the women’s movement [12,13,14], and the 1960s student movement in the US [15]
Summary
Relevant to the social science of youth cultures and subcultures is their role in vanguard movements of social change. It is fair to say that in social movement research youth and age-cohorts as determinant factors have not been accorded central theoretical roles This is puzzling because many of the major movements comprising the foundational literature of the social movements field today have generational relations and the role of younger activists at their core: in the civil rights movement [8,9,10,11], the women’s movement [12,13,14], and the 1960s student movement in the US [15]. 18–25-year-old cohort is substantially the same as, say, 25–35 year-olds, or—stepping up the develop-mental ladder, at least as far as most protest participation is concerned—to the 35–55 year-old adult actor We saw these assumptions in the shaping of the social movements field in the late 1980s and. This report probes the theoretical implications of taking this seriously and the effects of how the cognitive traits of young participants cluster to shape their collective actions
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