The Generations Game

It's been Diversity Week at The Bank. In common with all large institutional British companies, The Bank is pretty much British, white and middle-class, except for a handful of second-generation Indians and Chinese/Hong Kong/Japanese middle-class graduates, and the usual smattering of EC and ex-Colonial white middle-class graduates whose partners have real jobs in the City. You will search for a long long time before you see a West Indian or an African face in the Bank and even longer if you look in the ranks of "senior management" and above. Now this is partly because most of the British population is white (check the statistics - the rest of Britain is not like East London) and you need to be half-way numerate and literate, hence educated - or at least have a Business Studies degree - and hence middle-class, to work in banking. In other words, you're going to have a tough time demonstrating a lot of Diversity - compared with, say, an inner-London Local Council.

They did "Generational Diversity" and trotted out a graphic with Boomers, Generation Y and Generation X. It's a hoot. I've edited the graphic to protect my sources so you can chuckle away. For one thing, these are the US generations, not the UK ones, but that's really just a quibble.

The “Generations” idea isn’t serious psycho-sociology, or whatever discipline it should fall into. It’s a marketing device: you’d never heard of “The Greatest Generation” until “Saving Private Ryan”, “Band of Brothers” and all those other Second World War TV series and books. The idea that people will have similar attitudes and expectations just because they were born in the same (say) ten-year period is about as silly as astrology – except that astrology does a lot more detail. There was a spate of petty house-breakings in the early 1980’s: that had nothing to do with the weak moral fibre of the young men born twenty years previously, it was caused by the increased availability of cocaine and heroin combined with the availability of an easily stolen, easily-fenced high-value item: the video player. The disillusion of older people with corporations is not a function of when they were born: it’s how anyone would feel when they have seen all their friends and neighbours get dumped out of work because their employers are run by barely competent, socially irresponsible stock-market cronies. Career dynamics mean that you don’t see this happening to you and yours until you hit thirty-five or so. (But let’s not get into politics.) The attitudes of age-grouped people are due to their experiences, not their date of birth or even the circumstances of their birth. That puts politicians, bureaucrats and business managers on the hook for those attitudes – how much nicer to say it’s because there was no Internet when the disgruntled were born.

Not everyone is included in the “Generation”. Generation Y are supposed to have “multi-cultural ease”. Really? This applies to UK Indian boys who import village girls from back home because they find the Indian girls they went to school with too Westernised? How about the West Indians boys in Brixton who call anyone who aims to be a white-collar worker a “Coconut”? Or the young white lads in the National Front? Not so much. What it means is that nice middle-class graduate boys and girls of many ethnicities get on with each other and eat each other’s food – which is not surprising because it's not the ethnicity that's important but the middle-class graduate bit. Englishmen were marrying Indian women way back in the 1800’s. Attraction has always been ethnicity-free and it has always been culture-specific (smart people mix with smart people, cool people with cool people, outcasts with outcasts, normals with normals).

Remember, “Generations” is a marketing game, so the base population is the one your client can sell to. In the polarised world of post-modern capitalism, that tends to mean those nice middle-class graduate boys and girls of many ethnicities. They’re the ones with the money – outside the City. While we’re on the cultural thing, the “Generation” excludes people with strong morals (aka “religious beliefs”), other assorted outcasts and I’m not so sure it doesn’t exclude all the quiet apolitical people who do their jobs, raise their children to be reasonable people and have never been to an Apple Store or a steampunk event. Within whoever is left, some people will have had good luck, some bad luck, some were just born mess-ups and a few were born into money, contacts and influence. Even if they all went to the same school back in the day, they haven’t had the same lives and may have little in common with one another except a superannuated teenage pop culture.

Look at the details. Notice how "autonomy regarding work tasks" is a value for the older guys but not the younger? Actually, everyone wants that, but it's not so possible with young folk who do the junior and more process-bound roles. How convenient that they don't want it!

The question is why a serious company such as The Bank would go in for this twaddle. In this case, it's an easy way to tick a box no-one cares about anyway. And some people call me cynical.