Adult Themes - both X and Y-rated

The boot of flexibility, she argues, is firmly on management’s foot. The lack of commitment to one employer or job often attracts the ire of commentators, but is in fact a rational strategy responding to workplace restructuring.

What sense does it make to condemn Gen Y workers for not following a traditional career path when there are few on offer? And, Crawford also contends, picking up on her broader theme, these shifts in the nature of work are hardly peculiar to one generation.

Integrating her other theme, the masking of class difference by generational rhetoric, she highlights teenage and 20-something retail workers on the blunt edge of workplace flexibility. For every wired entrepreneurial knowledge worker written up in the business glossies, there are probably ten retail slaves having their penalty rates cut by a “fun” fast food chain.

Crawford has made two important contributions to public debate in Adult Themes. The first is to confront some of the sweeping generalisations of generation talk with evidence, and to reveal how angst about Gen Y and Gen X hides more than it reveals.

The second is to indicate that the social changes she points to are yet to be properly incorporated either into social norms or public debate generally. Her call for a debate over the “ethics of adulthood” may not be a barbecue stopper, but has the potential to take public conversation about our shared social situation down a track potentially far more interesting and productive than generation wars.

Adult Themes is both a lively and well-written book, which should help to reframe some of our most important public debates.