Making meaning of crisis: Unpacking crisis consciousness and response through Mannheim’s generational theory

As recent approaches to crisis and to generations have become discourse-centred, they have sidelined important issues of experience, meaning-making, and temporality. Without addressing these dimensions, the explanation of social-lived crisis and its variation across groups becomes limited. By revisiting Karl Mannheim’s generational theory together with his early cultural sociology, this paper develops a conjunctural theory of crisis consciousness arising from the interaction of cultural traditions, biographical trajectories, and environmental changes. Crisis consciousness emerges when inherited traditions no longer align with experiences in a transformed world. This process is mediated by a tradition’s past experienced responsiveness and efficacy, which can keep a tradition alive even when environmental conditions change. Key contributions are: an account of how cultural traditions mediate crisis experience and response, an explanation of variations in crisis uptake through the sociohistorically contingent saturation or desaturation of cultural repertoires, and a theory of meaning grounded in the historically contingent asymmetry between culture and environment. Overall, the paper refines sociological accounts of crisis translation by linking structural changes to sociohistorically patterned disruptions in meaning-making.