With this articulation of our perspective on the roles of generativity as active engagements in the world, we identify four roles of generativity that we believe are played-out in our lives:
Role One: raising children, enacting a project, or performing a specific job in an organization.
Role Two: mentoring, leading, and leaving a legacy inside an organization.
Role Three: leaving a legacy outside family and organization by fostering and ensuring the maintenance of a tradition and/or preserving heritage.
Role Four: working on behalf of a community or broader society, ensuring the welfare and prosperity of people living in this community or society.
While we will spend considerable time exemplifying each of these four roles, we begin with a simple illustration:
The first role of generativity is tangibly demonstrated in the offering of food to our family. We have engaged in a project (cooking a meal) that will benefit our children and other family members by providing nutrition, gratifying their senses, and creating a setting in which familial conversations can take place. Meals often provide sanctuaries in which certain kinds of words can be stated and in which nonverbal communication is prominent. Many religions make use of food and special meals to portray, honor, or invoke spiritual presence in a family setting.
Deep caring can move even further and deeper. We contract with a professional coach and indicate that we want to move “outward” in our life’s work. We want to work with the next generation. What happens when we want to convey to the next generation what we have learned about cooking? We prepare and distribute recipes. If we are particularly ambitious and are skilled and knowledgeable cooks, we write cookbooks or even host a cooking show on a cable channel. The goal is to spread and sustain our knowledge by teaching the next generation or our current generation. This is the second role of generativity.
With the encouragement of our coach, we not only write our own cookbook; we also honor other great cooks. We seek to preserve their recipes, cookbooks, and even previously recorded cooking shows. This is the third role of generativity, and it has to do with heritage and tradition. Say the public library in our town has decided to throw away or sell at a greatly discounted price older books to make room for newer ones. Among them are some old cookbooks that seem out of date and are among the first books to be discarded. You find out about this decision and petition to keep the outdated books, noting that great recipes remain eternally valid and vital. It would be a shame to discard this enduring culinary wisdom and dishonor the wonderful women and men who carefully prepared these books. This is Generativity Three at its height.
This third role of generativity can also be enacted when we seek to honor a person who has won the most baking contests at the annual county fair over the past 30 years. We collect baking recipes from many people in our community and assemble them in a cookbook named after the baking champion. Researchers in many fields have been doing this for many years. They honor a colleague who has made major contributions to their field by assembling a series of essays that focus on the themes and findings for which their honored colleague is noted. These assembled essays are given a fancy, Germanic name— they are called “Festschrifts.” This is big time Generativity Three.
There is a fourth way in which generativity is enacted on behalf of the culinary arts. Our coach encourages us to think “outward” not only in time (honoring contributions by others) but also in space (reaching out to our community). We can engage our community in the enhancement of these arts. We start a recipe-sharing club. We ask a chef in town to come to one of our homes and cook a meal for some members of our community. At the same time, the chef offers some tips about cooking and shares her recipe at the end of the meal. We pay for the food and chef, and the chef donates the money to a charitable cause. The chef finds the event to be personally gratifying, and her restaurant gets some publicity.
Download Article 1K Club
