It is the position of this paper that those collectives of individuals with histories of discrimination (e.g., ethnic minorities, women, etc.) will, in the future, increasingly become less unified and more fractional and fragmentary resulting in their having less strength as a sociopolitical group. In other words, while in the 1960s and 1970s, it was possible for oppressed groups such as Hispanics or Blacks or women to marshall substantial numbers of their collective or group to effect sociopolitical action in order to advance what was perceived as a common, unified goal, it will be less and less possible for these groups to marshall such forces by the turn of the century.
The first evidence for this claim can be found in Eisenstadt's analysis of modernization and its effects on youth. In particular, Eisenstadt notes that while the term "youth," was widely applicable to the young people of the 1960s and early 1970s, this is no longer the case due to increasingly fractionalization in the perspective, values, occupational focus, and behavior of young people.
Eisenstadt cites found factors as responsible for the fractionalization of the youth culture. These are:
(1) the increasing specialization of institutions and social roles;
(2) the decreasing influence of the family on children's occupational selection;
(3) the growth of formal education; and
(4) the extension of the transitional period from adolescence to adulthood.
The result of these forces, according to Eisenstadt, is that there is no longer one youth culture; rather, there exist multiple youth groups and cultures which are becoming increasingly diverse and specialized in terms of values, goals and occupation. Another way of saying this is that young people are no longer identifying with one another as a common collective.
It seems reasonable to state that since "youth" is composed, in part, of historically oppressed groups
...