A Qualitative Exploration of Generational Identity: Making Sense of Young and Old in the Context of Today’s Workplace
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the extant research concerning generations in the workplace relies on objective definitions of generational groups based on birth years. This research has produced highly mixed and contradictory results, raising significant questions about the legitimacy of generations as a workplace phenomenon. In this qualitative study, we sought a more nuanced and subjective conceptualization of generation as a basis for social and individual identity in organizations. Through in-depth interviews with 105 Canadians, we examined the degree to which people use generation as a basis for social identity, why people identify with generational groups (or not), and whether there are age-related patterns in generational identification. The results suggest that people do make use of generation as a social category; but some do not identify with any generational group and others are unsure of their identification. Furthermore, generational labels such as “Baby Boomers,” “Generation X,” and “Millennials” are not universally connected to people’s sense of generational identity, with younger participants being less likely to identify with a label. Rather, generation is used as a conceptual frame to make sense of “young” and “old” within a given historical context. We recommend discarding the presumption of homogeneity within age cohorts and allowing for a diversity of orientations toward generational prototypes. This suggests that age cohort alone is insufficient as a means of operationalizing generations for the purposes of research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".