Project Summary: In no more than 200 words, provide a brief description of your project, including the puzzle you intend to address, the key questions your project attempts to answer, and a brief discussion of how you intend on answering those questions.
This paper will address the question of how we should understand Millennial behaviors and trends that are coded as entitled, specifically Millennial workplace boundaries and attitudes related to career goals. James Cairns’ 2017 book, The Myth of the Age of Entitlement defines the myth as the assumption that “young people today, more than at any point in history, take for granted the bounty they’ve inherited and expect to have praise and a good life handed to them without anything in return” (Cairns 2017, 2). Are the tendencies that are often coded as demonstrations of Millennial entitlement radical responses to an increasingly materialistic and competitive society? Are they defensive responses to being implicated in injustice and inequality?
I will develop a survey on Millennial attitudes toward work and workplace and disseminate it through snowball sampling of Millennials aged 21-30 to research how Millennials are boundary-setting. I will use historical, political and socioeconomic research to address why these behaviors and attitudes are coded as entitled. I will address who is labeling, when theses labels are applied and to whom.