Millennials, Generation Z and the Future of Tourism

Fabio Corbisiero, Salvatore Monaco, Elisabetta Ruspini

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781845417604
• eBook ISBN: 9781845417635
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book examines the lifestyles, expectations and plans of Millennials and Generation Z and how they are redefining tourism. It demonstrates that if the tourism industry is to enjoy future growth, it must understand and meet the particular needs of these two generations. The volume explores the present and future challenges faced by the tourism industry as a result of the generational turnover, and seeks to answer the following questions: What contribution can the new generations make to the future of tourism? How are technological advancements and social networks shaping future travel trends? Can a generational perspective be useful to help the tourism industry recover from the COVID-19 crisis? The book will be of interest to researchers and students of sociology and tourism studies, as well as tourism professionals.

Part 1
On the Go with the New Generations

1 Generations, Events, Experiences, Tourism

Elisabetta Ruspini

Introduction

This introductory chapter offers a theoretical reflection on the usefulness of applying a generational approach to the study of tourism. The notion of generation is one of the most important sociological concepts to describe both the nature of the mutual relation between individual and society (Alwin & McCammon, 2007) and to explain social change. Generation is a measure of historical time. The term ‘generation’ refers to a group with a common and distinctive identity shaped by experience, and the stratification of this experience, through time. Generation has been defined (Gilleard, 2004) as a temporally located ‘cultural field’ emerging at a particular moment in history within which individuals from a potential variety of overlapping birth cohorts participate as generational agents. Exposure to key historical events that took place during each cohort’s transition to adulthood provides the markers for each generational field (Gilleard, 2004: 112, 114). Thus, generation covers a wide range of cohorts. Generational theory emanates from Karl Mannheim’s (1928, 1952) fundamental work on generations, identity and knowledge, which suggests that cultural differences between generations come from significant (social, economic or political) events which have occurred during formative years, from being exposed to analogous primary and secondary socialisation processes, and from the interchange between young people and society’s accumulated cultural heritage. The formative experiences of each generation influence its members’ lifelong beliefs, values and behaviour: each generation has peculiar characteristics, needs and expectations, unique to that generational group.

In the tourism literature, there are still limited studies of generational change. However, recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in generational analysis in tourism studies, highlighting differences in tourist behaviours among generations (Beldona et al., 2009; Benckendorff et al., 2010; Chiang et al., 2014; Corbisiero, 2020; Corbisiero & Ruspini, 2018; Haydam et al., 2017; Huang & Lu, 2017; Li et al., 2013; Pennington-Gray et al., 2002; Southan, 2017). Those and other studies have shown that knowledge gained through the lens of generational theory can provide useful theoretical insight and practical implications for tourism scholars and practitioners (Pendergast, 2010). Research has not only shown the value of generational analysis in tourism research, but has also concluded that a greater use of generational analysis is needed to examine changes in travel behaviour (Gardiner et al., 2014; Li et al., 2013; Oppermann, 1995). Moreover, as written by Hansen and Leuty (2012: 34), organisations today are faced with the challenges of integrating different generations in the workplace as well as the complexity of creating environments to attract and satisfy workers of each generation.

In light of the above, borrowing from both Mannheim’s seminal work and other prominent theories of generations, this chapter explains what a generational theory is. It then discusses the relationship between generations and tourism choices, investigating contemporary applications of the generational concept in tourism. Specific attention is devoted to the analysis of the main characteristics of millennials and Gen Z members. Getting to know the younger generations is crucial since they represent the future of travel and tourism (Corbisiero & Ruspini, 2018). To conclude, the final section discusses the pros and cons of generational analysis.

Generational Theories

Generation is a rich and complex concept that encompasses academic disciplines ranging from biology to social anthropology, to psychology, to demography, to philosophy, to history and sociology (Jansen, 1974; Kertzer, 1983). The complexity of the concept of generation has posed difficulties for researchers in various areas. Its multidimensional nature has attracted a wide array of research methods and methodologies, often leading to paradigmatic conflicts and disagreements (Allen et al., 2015). As Kertzer (1983) notes, in the social sciences different concepts of generations overlap. Kertzer (1983: 125–126) places them in four categories: generation as a principle of kinship descent; generation as cohort; generation as life stage; and generation as historical period. The concept of generation has a long tradition in social anthropology: social anthropologists use it in referring not only to the relationship between parents and their children, but also to the larger universe of kinship relations. The concept of generation has been used by anthropologists to explain social change over time, as it implies relations in a temporal perspective (Lamb, 2015). Demographers refer to a cohort notion of generations: people moving through the age strata, the younger replacing the older as all age together. According to Kertzer, Piotr Sorokin’s (1947) discussion of conflicts between younger and older generations is a well-known example of its life-stage usage, while Shmuel Eisenstadt’s (1956) classic study combined the descent and life-stage meanings of generation. Eisenstadt’s (1956: 9) basic hypothesis concerns the ‘existence of age groups in societies not regulated by kinship or other particularistic criteria’. The use of generation to characterise the people living in a particular historical period is more common in history (Tannenbaum, 1976; Wohl, 1979): in this sense, generation covers a wide range of cohorts.

Generation as a social concept is a modern one. The definition of generation in sociohistorical terms emerged at the beginning of the 19th century. Views and theories concerning the generations of this period began to withdraw from the ancient meaning originating from the ­biological–genealogical framework (Kortti, 2011) — possibly because it was a time of accelerating historical change (Jaeger, 1985). As noted (Bristow, 2015a), industrialisation emphasised a conflict between continuity and change, and part of this was a disruption of stable generational boundaries: the industrial society, and its institutions, weakened the significance of kinship. As argued by Eisenstadt (1963), especially in the first phase of modernisation, there has been a growing discontinuity between the lives of children. New and enlarged perspectives in the social world favoured the development of generational tensions, particularly in relation to youth, and this challenged a model of life governed by kinship relations. This tendency brought out the need to use the concept of ‘generation’ as a framework in which to explain some of the sweeping changes that were happening. The concept of generation became a way of interpreting social change and organising thoughts about such radical change (Donati, 1995). Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Wilhelm Dilthey were three of the most important thinkers to reflect on the generations of the 19th century and they created new viewpoints compared with previous studies. August Comte (1849) was the first to begin a scientific study of generations in history. Comte systematically examined the succession of generations as the moving force in historical progress. John Stuart Mill (1865) later expressed similar ideas by arguing that human beings are historically shaped and made what they are by the accumulated influence of past generations (Bouton, 1965). In his study of German romanticism, Wilhelm Dilthey (1875) observed that the absorption of formative impressions during adolescence tends to transmit for life to a great number of individuals of the same age relatively homogeneous philosophical, social and cultural guidelines (Jaeger, 1985: 275–276). Dilthey (1910) suggested that each epoch defines a life-horizon by which people orient their life, life concerns and life experience.

However, views from the 19th century did not yet include the idea of experience uniting generation members and the generational consciousness produced by it (Kortti, 2011: 70–71). Generations were still mainly regarded as age groups, even though as the century progressed the concept began to take on a cultural meaning, creating a framework in which to explain some of the sweeping changes happening. All of the most important modern generation theories were formulated in Europe starting from the 20th century, particularly in the 1920s. The group of generation theoreticians from the beginning of the 20th century includes the French cultural philosopher François Mentré (1920), the German art historian Wilhelm Pinder (1926), the Spanish philosopher and humanist José Ortega y Gasset (1933) and the German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1928, 1952). According to Woodman (2016: 20), the first sustained formalised sociological theorising of generations appeared along with the development of youth research. European scholars of generation (Mannheim, 1952; Mentré, 1920; Ortega y Gassett, 1933) were showing that youth could vary over time, with effects for the future of societies.

Contemporary generational theory focuses on the influence and impact of sociohistorical processes on the development of the shared meaning of events and experiences of age groups, highlighting the cultural aspects of cohorts. Generational theory is based on the concept that generations are different from each other due to significant social, economic or political events (especially if they occurred during the formative period, i.e. adolescence and early adulthood), resulting in specific and markedly different values, attitudes and lifestyles (Singer & Prideaux, 2006). People who are in young adulthood during significant national or international events will form a shared memory of those events which will affect their future attitudes, preferences and behaviour (Parry & Urwin, 2011: 81; Schuman & Scott, 1989). The conceptualisation of a generation as individuals sharing a common location in the historical dimension of the social process, youth experiences marked by unique social circumstances and events, and a fundamental sense of a common history, is rooted in Karl Mannheim’s theory.

Karl Mannheim’s work

Mannheim provided the most comprehensive and systematic treatment of the concept from a sociological viewpoint and modern empirical studies of generations proceed from his theoretical contributions. In Mannheim’s (1927/28) classic treatise ‘The Sociological Problem of Generations’, he outlined the idea that generation is to be understood as a complex set of social interconnections situated in a given historical period. The social phenomenon of generations embraces related ‘age groups’ similarly embedded in history, in so far as they all are exposed to the same phase of the sociohistorical process (Spitzer, 1973). Mannheim pays particular attention to the dialectical relationship between the pace of change and the succession of generations, as well as to the potential contribution of young people to social and cultural change (Merico, 2012), emphasising the agency of youth. As noted (Woodman, 2016, 2018), Mannheim began to think in sociological terms about generational change in the wake of World War I and its impact on the young generation. He argued that ways of life pursued by the previous generation became at points in the historical process difficult to maintain, for example after a shared traumatic experience like the Great War. More specifically, his aim was to understand the way different cohorts of German youth contested the ideas inherited from their parents’ generation, and how these groups could become the source of new values and new political movements. The ‘problems of generations’, from Mannheim’s point of view, was to understand how ideas were transmitted and reshaped over time: in sociological terms, the construction and reconstruction of knowledge within multiple social forces (Bristow, 2015b).

Mannheim identifies three key dimensions: generation location (‘Generationslagerung’), generation as an actuality (‘Generationszusammenhang’) and generation unit (‘Generationseinheit’) (Diepstraten et al., 1999; Simirenko, 1966). A ‘generation location’ refers to individuals who are located within the same generation by birth and are consequently exposed to a common range of events. By participating in the same historical and social circumstances, members of the same generation share, at least to a significant degree, experiences and challenges and belong to a common destiny in cultural and historical terms. The location in which individuals are socialised functions as a structure of opportunities which might be translated into a common culture or worldview. However, according to Mannheim (1952: 297): ‘The fact that people are born at the same time, or that their youth, adulthood, and old age coincide, does not in itself involve similarity of location; what does create a similar location is that they are in a position to experience the same events and data, etc. and especially that these experiences impinge upon a similarly “stratified” consciousness’. In other words, not every generation location creates new collective impulses and formative principles and develops an original and distinctive consciousness (Mannheim, 1952: 309). There needs to be an active recognition of the shared experiences (Knight, 2009). ‘Generation as an actuality’ only arises where a concrete bond and generational consciousness are created between its members by their being exposed to the same social and intellectual stimulus. This conceptualisation presupposes that generation members subjectively identify with their generation (Diepstraten et al., 1999): a ‘generation as an actuality’ is constituted when people sharing a similar location in history also participate in a common destiny. Mannheim (1952: 304; Pilcher, 1994: 490) expresses the difference between ‘generational location’ and ‘generation as actuality’ as that of potentially being capable of actively participating in the ‘characteristic social and intellectual currents of their society and period’. In Mannheim’s theory, the step from a generation location to a generation as an actuality depends on the recognition of common experiences during the formative years, the years of youth (Pilcher, 1994). This is because generation members need to be old enough to deeply experience life-defining events while at the same time be in a young enough life stage where they can significantly influence their worldviews. According to Mannheim (1952: 304): ‘Youth experiencing the same concrete historical problems may be said to be part of the same actual generation; while those groups within the same actual generation which work up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways, constitute separate generation units’.

The ‘generation unit’ represents a much more concrete bond than the actual generation as such because of the converging responses it involves. Formative and interpretive principles form a link between spatially separated individuals who may never come into personal contact at all (Mannheim, 1952: 306). Generation units express the generation style in their action: the German youth movement is Mannheim’s example. Members of new generations can emerge as change agents both challenging traditional interpretations of historical conditions and offering an alternative interpretation, standing in opposition to previous generations and the cultural heritage they represent (Demartini, 1985: 2). Mannheim (1952: 293) emphasises the importance of ‘fresh contacts’ with the prevailing culture, that is, between young people and society’s accumulated cultural heritage. The phenomenon of ‘fresh contact’ is a productive force: each new generation has the opportunity to reinterpret the existing cultural heritage and this ensures the continuous renewal of culture. Future engagements will build upon early cultural engagements and the capacity to rework the cultural legacy of previous generations (Woodman, 2018). If generation shapes subjectivity by both delimiting the range of possible beliefs and actions and providing the catalyst for new social movements and generational change within a culture (Mannheim, 1952: 303), this subjective dimension does not mean that all young people share the same beliefs or values. According to Mannheim, contemporaneous individuals are internally stratified by their physical location, culture, gender and class, and this stratification causes members to see the world differently. Mannheim explained that even if young people can develop a sense of belonging to the same generation oriented to analogous life experiences and challenges, differences and conflicts are possible (Woodman, 2016, 2018): members of a generation could have ‘polar’ responses to a shared generation location (Mannheim, 1952: 304; also Ortega y Gasset, 1933). On the one hand, each actual generation is subdivided into a number of generation units: different individuals, while experiencing common sociohistorical stimuli, may respond to them in a different manner. On the other hand, generation units build upon the consciousness of belonging to one generation.

A generation unit must contain two related and essential elements: a common location in time (generation location) and a distinct consciousness of that historical position, a ‘mentalité’ or ‘entelechy’¹ shaped by the events and experiences of that time. In Mannheim’s formulation, both location and consciousness need to exist in order that a generation can function as a vehicle of social change and that active generation units become agencies of change, actively constructing the history of society (Gilleard, 2004; Merico, 2012). Drawing on Wilhelm Dilthey’s work, Mannheim also suggests that a thorough understanding of the problems of generations relies on a qualitative appreciation of the personal temporal experience (Costa et al., 2019; Moreno & Urraco, 2018). Each generation, although contemporaneous with other generations, has a distinctive historical consciousness, which leads to a different approach to the same social and cultural phenomena (Pilcher, 1994: 488–489). While older and younger generations may experience the same historical events, the effects of these events will be different due to the different accumulation of experiences along the life course. The gap between young and older generations can thus be explained by the existence of a gap between the ideals they have learned from older generations and the realities they experience.

Mannheim’s historical generational theory has been indispensable tools for discussing social change, to overcome the reductionism of cohorts by bringing culture back into the discussion (Aboim & Vasconcelos, 2013), and to emphasise the active human element in the development of history, bringing out the close connection between history and the ways in which people live their lives. This opened opportunities to rethink the relationships that young people have with the wider macro- and micro-processes (France & Roberts, 2015). Notwithstanding this, the conceptual ground for studying generations remains a problematic domain due to the theoretical and methodological difficulties in researching the multiple dimensions of the generational process and the role played by social and cultural factors in the production of social generations (Alwin & McCammon, 2007; Edmunds & Turner, 2005; Eyerman & Turner, 1998; Gilleard, 2004; Pilcher, 1994). Within this context, Aboim and Vasconcelos (2013) underline the need to reach an enlarged conception of social generations as discursive formations, countering Mannheim’s reduction of generations to units of individuals operating in the fields of political and ideological struggle. A further criticism is that Mannheim did not provide an answer to the question of how generations act strategically to bring about change (Edmunds & Turner, 2005: 561–562). Instead, it is crucial to understand how sharing a generational experience can produce self-conscious generations acting to trigger change. Moreno and Urraco (2018) believe it is necessary to introduce the component of social class. The two authors recognise the validity of the approach proposed by Karl Mannheim, in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Tourism at the Crossroads: Between Past, Present and Future
• Part 1: On the Go with the New Generations
• Part 2: Technologies and the Sharing Economy in Tourism
• Part 3: Generations, Gender and LGBT Issues in Tourism
• Conclusion: Understanding the Present to Prepare for the Future (of Tourism)
• References
• Index