Ancestral leadership: Place-based intergenerational leadership

This article introduces the notion of ancestral leadership that emerges from intergenerational wisdom at the intersection of people, place and ancestral knowledge. Place is a key component of collective continuity in ancestral leadership that reinforces identity, belonging and intergenerational reciprocity. The findings show that places carry leadership legacies and require ongoing maintenance to ensure genealogies of leadership are available to future generations. Engagement with ancestral leadership and its practical application is not bound to tribal and cultural contexts. By knowing the place of someone’s ancestors as a lens into their leadership, one sees structures of accountability that extends beyond culturally bound contexts, and includes their leadership expressed in professional environments. The authors contribute to leadership theory by illuminating how ancestral legacies of leadership continue to inform contemporary generations of leadership and is transmitted intergenerationally within frameworks of genealogy.

Reconfiguring Intergenerational Reciprocity

This chapter traces the trajectories through which aging migrant populations navigate temporalities of migration as they reconstruct intergenerational intimacy. It argues that aging immigrants transform cultural ideals of aging and family in response to changes in their social worlds across life stages. It also offers the concept of reconfigured reciprocity to analyze the processes through which aging immigrants fashion cultural logics of intergenerational relations to sustain connections with their children and their children's families. The chapter focuses on older immigrants that embraced ethnic traditions regarding elder care and transformed reciprocal relationships with their immediate kin. It highlights the aging immigrants' assessment of family relations that is undoubtedly biased or selective and their understanding of receiving and transnational contexts that are stereotypical or oversimplified.

Reflecting on Sacrifices Made by Past Generations Increases a Sense of Obligation Towards Future Generations

Tackling climate change presents an intergenerational dilemma: People must make sacrifices today, to benefit future generations. What causes people to feel an obligation to benefit future generations? Past research has suggested “intergenerational reciprocity” as a potential driver, but this research is quite domain specific, and it is unknown how well it applies to climate change. We explored a novel means of invoking a sense of intergenerational reciprocity: inducing reflection on the sacrifices made by previous generations. Our studies revealed that such reflection predicts and causes a heightened sense of moral obligation towards future generations, mediated by gratitude. However, there are also some downsides (e.g., feelings of unworthiness), and perceptions of obligation do not substantially affect pro-environmental attitudes or motivations. Thus, while reflecting on past generations’ sacrifices can generate a sense of intergenerational obligation, it is limited in the extent to which it can increase pro-environmental concern.

Watkins & Goodwin Sacrifices 2019 Pre-Print

Environmental problems such as climate change present formidable psychological barriers because they require action now to produce advantageous outcomes many years hence. Accordingly, it is important to understand how to motivate moral concern and a sense of moral obligation towards future generations. Some past research has explored whether encouraging “intergenerational reciprocity” might increase such a sense of obligation. However, this research is limited either in its robustness, or in its direct applicability to general environmental problems such as climate change. In the present research with U.S. residents recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, we explored a novel means of invoking this sense of intergenerational reciprocity: Asking individuals to reflect on the sacrifices made by previous generations. An initial correlation study showed that perceptions of past generations’ sacrifices correlated with a sense of moral obligation towards future generations. Subsequent experimental studies showed that reflecting on such sacrifices increased a sense of moral obligation towards future generations. A within-paper meta-analysis suggests that the overall effect is Cohen’s d = .352, 95% CIs [0.227, 0.477]. In all studies, this effect was statistically mediated by gratitude. However, this sort of reflection carries a potential downside – it also generates a feeling of being unworthy of past generations’ sacrifices, which suppresses the overall effect on moral obligation. And it is limited in not directly translating into pro-environmental behavioral intentions and attitudes. In sum, the present studies report a novel means of invoking intergenerational reciprocity, while also calling attention to limiting factors that warrant further attention.

Gender, work and care in policy and practice: Working mothers’ experience of intergenerational exchange of care in South Korea

This article aims to uncover working mothers’ experiences in relation to intergenerational exchange of care and support in South Korea. It examines the impact of Confucian gender ideology on the operation of intergenerational reciprocity within the Korean family. Increasing numbers of working mothers make intergenerational exchange of care between working mothers and their family members an important issue. Although studies have focused on the importance of the Confucian virtue of filial piety in intergenerational support, little research has explored the influence of Confucian gender ideology on working mothers’ experiences of intergenerational exchange from a gender perspective. This article aims to fill this research gap by exploring the experiences of Korean working mothers in the intergenerational exchange of care. It draws on qualitative semi-structured interviews with 30 married women in paid employment in Seoul, Korea, carried out in 2014. This article argues that traditional gender expectations of married women’s responsibility for parents-in-law persist regarding intergenerational reciprocity, despite recent development of policies for care.