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This chapter focuses on the concept of ‘generation’ as a way of popularising the idea of age. It first considers how generations shape societies before discussing their implications for social and organisational change. It then examines the place occupied by ‘generation’ in popular management and in the manner we categorise one another, along with the creation of demographic groups such as the Silents, the Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y. It also looks at the notion of ‘the multi-generational workforce’ and concludes by explaining how the idea of generation has influenced the way we grasp changes in family lineage, the shared impact of a lifetime’s events, and the predilections of cohorts of people born in the same year or period.

The prevailing masculine culture of drinking had consistently thwarted efforts to attract female custom. Brewing company executives blocked entry of women into pub tenancies, hired managers whose wives received no remuneration and employed estate managers who presided over many licensed premises as notable for their overwhelming masculinity as for their vile hygiene. Traditional pub culture had little to offer women. Critics of the Thatcher Government Beer Orders have exaggerated its impact. Before the government imposed restraints in 1989, pubcos had begun changing the retailing of alcohol. The beer orders accelerated emergence of a new culture in which women as consumers, tenants or managers now became conspicuous. New women’s drinking habits emerged, and females played a critical role as decision makers in determining what alcohol was purchased.

This chapter probes the depiction of zombies in such contemporary novels as World War Z, Zombie Haiku, and the revisionist classic Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Authors Margo Collins and Elson Bond argue that the zombie is uniquely appealing to today's technologically savvy, fast-paced generation and, as such, can serve as a mirror for some of Generation Y's values and notions of identity. New millennium zombie-ism demonstrates an apparent divergence into what initially appears to be two distinct categories: zombie-as-comedy and zombie-as-threat, but as the chapter argues, time and again those two categories overlap in intriguing and symbolic ways. Ultimately, depictions of both kinds of zombies come to function as monstrous placeholders for potentially dangerous human interactions in an anomic society. Accustomed to instant communication with virtual strangers, insulated from the natural world and dependent on fragile transportation, communication, and power networks, millennial audiences have good reason to fear the chaotic anonymity of zombies.

This chapter describes a new category of actor, performer, and model, described by fashion writer Ruth La Ferla as “ethnically ambiguous,” that appeared, seemingly overnight. “Ambiguity is chic,” La Ferla noted, “especially among the under-25s, members of Generation Y, the most racially diverse population in the nation's history.” Describing a fascination with this “melting pot aesthetic,” she calls attention to the efforts of H & M, the “cheap chic clothing chain,” which ha[s] “increasingly highlight[ed] models with racially indeterminate features,” and the continental clothier, Benetton, whose newer ads “play[ed] up the multiracial theme,” foregrounding bodies that offered a confusing hodgepodge of racial details. Advertisers, La Ferla concluded, are intensely interested in “neutral” bodies, capable of appealing to multiple constituencies, and capable of being read in different ways by different groups of people.