Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I explore how Americans use generation as a taxonomic classification to address recent changes in capitalism, focusing in particular on HR webinars geared towards offering insights into intergenerational conflict in the workplace.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore how Americans use generation as a taxonomic classification to address recent changes in capitalism, focusing in particular on HR webinars geared towards offering insights into intergenerational conflict in the workplace. As a native anthropologist, I explore the appeal of generations, a taxonomic stereotype, and, for Americans, a welcome alternative to more charged dyadic typifications based on race or gender. In US workplaces, people frequently turn to taxonomic stereotypes to imagine patterned forms of conflict resolution, or explain how social interactions unfold in quotidian spaces in which people find it useful for personalities – which are functioning as an interpretative lens on behavior -- to be typified. My starting point is contrasting taxonomic stereotypes with dyadic stereotypes. In dyadic stereotypes, Self and Other emerges from an A/not-A logic. Not so for taxonomic stereotypes, which are on a set of positive contrasts (Silvio 2019). Different categories in a taxonomic classification may share the same qualities, both Virgos and Capricorns might be lovers of order, or millennials and Generation-Xers might both require a sense of passion to remain at their jobs. What makes a category distinctive is the precise way in which it combines a number of attributes. In this paper, I explore the implications of using taxonomic stereotypes to think through narrated workplace dynamics, asking what lens this offers for understanding how people interpret their experiences of capitalism, conflict, and social change.