Generation challenge in the post-Covid period

Abstract

Our study reflects on the social change that has began in the world in late autumn 2019. The Covid-pandemic is an exogenous shock (Illés et al. 2020), an asteroid effect that fundamentally changed normality in the Western world. In our theoretical paper, we argue that generation as a central theoretical and analytical category of Karl Mannheim and the neo-Mannheimian literature, is well suited to describe young people’s changing cultural trends of the post-Covid period. In this context, we believe that the new, historical generation in the Mannheimian sense (Szabó 2020a, Szabó 2020b) can be best understood in terms of cultural value changes. We also examine forms of ’approaching’ and 'assiminilating’ cultural based on age-specific characteristics.