The Next 20 Years: How Customer and Workforce Attitudes Will Evolve
The Fourth Turning, from Harvard Business Online, by Neil Howe and William Strauss
"In 1969, amid all the uproar on college campuses, the sociologist Peter Harris published a 200-page monograph on changing social trends in the Harvard journal Perspectives in American History. His conclusion: Over the course of three centuries of American history, a wide variety of social indicators - birth rate, marriage age, wage growth, social mobility, political activism - have turned an abrupt corner every 22 years or so. Emerging out of reams of archival evidence, this insistent pattern compelled Harris to rethink the standard linearism of historical interpretation. Maybe, he thought, the long-term trends toward urbanization, industrialization, and education that many had traced were not the primary forces of history after all. Maybe it was "possible to see, through long periods of American history, a surprisingly regular pattern of growth and change in the social system" - in other words, "a truly cyclical system of human life."
In recent decades many distinguished scholars have joined Harris in identifying what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has called "patterns of alternation, of ebb and of flow, in human history."
They have identified cyclical trends in such diverse areas as war, religious awakening, economic activity, foreign policy, demography, immigration, substance abuse, and gender relations".
Read the rest of the article ...
"In 1969, amid all the uproar on college campuses, the sociologist Peter Harris published a 200-page monograph on changing social trends in the Harvard journal Perspectives in American History. His conclusion: Over the course of three centuries of American history, a wide variety of social indicators - birth rate, marriage age, wage growth, social mobility, political activism - have turned an abrupt corner every 22 years or so. Emerging out of reams of archival evidence, this insistent pattern compelled Harris to rethink the standard linearism of historical interpretation. Maybe, he thought, the long-term trends toward urbanization, industrialization, and education that many had traced were not the primary forces of history after all. Maybe it was "possible to see, through long periods of American history, a surprisingly regular pattern of growth and change in the social system" - in other words, "a truly cyclical system of human life."
In recent decades many distinguished scholars have joined Harris in identifying what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has called "patterns of alternation, of ebb and of flow, in human history."
They have identified cyclical trends in such diverse areas as war, religious awakening, economic activity, foreign policy, demography, immigration, substance abuse, and gender relations".
Read the rest of the article ...
posted by mick yates @ 11:14 PM permalink
1 Comments:
At 4:00 PM,
Wally Bock said…
I've been fascinated with Strauss and Howe's interpretation of generational cycles in American history since I read their book, Generations back in the early 90s. They provide a usable framework for analyzing sociiological changes that affect us as individuals and in the workplace.
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