GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCE AT WORK RECONSIDERED: A Critical, Comparative, and Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Success, Career, and Power across Western Institutional Regimes

This working paper subjects the popular idea of generational difference at work to critical, comparative, and quantitative scrutiny. It asks how much explanatory power the birth cohort actually carries across three domains, the meaning of success, the shape of the career, and the distribution of power, and it argues, on both conceptual and empirical grounds, that the cohort is almost always the wrong explanatory variable. The analysis rests on three moves. First, it applies the Age-Period-Cohort framework as a discipline that binds the author as much as the positions it criticizes, and it reports an original variance decomposition on World Values Survey microdata (waves 1989 to 2014): the birth cohort accounts for between 0.10 and 0.20 percent of the variance in work centrality in the full sample, and between 0.25 and 0.46 percent in the Western subsample, an order of magnitude below age and consistent with the published estimates of Hajdu and Sik. On this outcome neither cohort nor class dominates; more than ninety-five percent of the variance is individual. Because the cohort effect is not identified without an assumption, the estimate is reported as an interval, and a technical appendix documents the procedure and its validation. Second, the paper treats the recurrent narratives of the contemporary workplace, success as meaning, the boundaryless career, the flattening of power, and the inevitability of artificial intelligence, as legitimation devices whose common effect, if not intent, is the transfer of risk, control, and power from organizations and owners to individuals and workers. This reading is explicitly located in its intellectual lineage (Boltanski and Chiapello, Sennett, Beck, Kalleberg) and stated in falsifiable, non-functionalist terms. Third, it argues that the true mediating variable is the institutional regime, not the continent and not the cohort, and it compares the liberal market regime with the coordinated regimes, disaggregating Europe into its internal varieties. The scope is explicitly limited to the aging high-income West, with an out-of-sample test on the Chinese case. The paper closes with a constructive agenda of five design principles and two scenarios for 2030 to 2040, distinguishing descriptive findings from normative recommendations throughout. It integrates evidence on values, careers, organizational power, algorithmic and cultural control, and the labor-market effects of generative AI. Preprint, not peer reviewed. Version 2.