Fostering the Generative Society: Agency and Communion
Many years ago, Sigmund Freud indicated that our capacity to both love deeply and engage in productive work defines our quality of life (and perhaps our level of sanity). The first architect of generativity, Erik Erikson, similarly emphasized the integral connections between love and work. Both are needed to foster generativity. Erik Erikson spoke of this requirement on many occasions, perhaps most eloquently and succinctly in Insight and Responsibility: “As adult man needs to be needed [loved], so . . . he requires the challenge emanating from what he has generated [work] and from what now must be ‘brought up,’ guarded, preserved–and eventually transcended.” (Erikson, 1964, p. 131) Like Erikson, we wish to emphasize the integral connections between love and work, as both are needed to foster generativity.
This integration is played out in the vital connection between agency and communion that McAdams and then Snyder and Clary emphasize in their portraits of generative society:
[A]t the heart of generativity is communion and altruism, on the one hand, and agency and narcissism, on the other. Accordingly, along with other-oriented concerns for future generations, generativity may have as the self-oriented aim “creating something in one’s own image, a powerful act of self-expansion.” (McAdams, 2001, p. 405) (Snyder and Clary, 2004, p. 232)
In our interviews with Sage leaders, the role played by agency and hard, persistent work is clearly evident. Furthermore, we see in our study of civic engagement that generative work is sustained in a community that appreciates and honors this agency (as we noted above regarding the creation of an appreciative society). We also discovered that generative agency shows up in many forms. This, in turn, means that there must be multiple ways in which agency is supported in any society that wishes to be generative. An insightful and more detailed account of this need for multiple support mechanisms was offered by Dollahite, Slife and Hawkins (1998, p. 475):
Download Article 1K ClubGenerative agency is holistic (choice is embedded in a web of other choices, contexts, and constraints), temporal (choices and constraints change over time), spiritual (choice is enhanced and challenged by spiritual connections and convictions), capability-oriented (the exercise of choice brings greater capabilities), and moral (people are accountable for their choices).
