The Futures of Old Age

John A Vincent, Chris Phillipson, Murna Downs, John A Vincent, Chris Phillipson, Murna Downs

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781412901086, 9781412901079
• eBook ISBN: 9781446240045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Gerontologia

What is the future of old age? How will families, services, and economies adapt to an older population? Such questions often provoke extreme and opposing answers: some see ageing populations as having the potential to undermine economic growth and prosperity; others see new and exciting ways of living in old age. The Futures of Old Age places these questions in the context of social and political change, and assesses what the various futures of old age might be.

Prepared by the British Society of Gerontology, The Futures of Old Age brings together a team of leading international gerontologists from the United Kingdom and United States, drawing on their expertise and research. The book?s seven sections deal with key contemporary themes including: population ageing; households and families; health; wealth; pensions; migration; inequalities; gender and self; and identity in later life.

Part I

The Future of the Life Course

Old age can be thought of as a stage in the life course, one of a series of transitions that people pass through between birth and death. There are strong normative expectations about appropriate behaviour for different points in the life course, including that of later life. However, life courses vary not only between different social groups – for example, between men and women – they also vary historically.

Models of the life course differ according to the number of life stages identified. There are two-stage models which simply contrast old age with the rest of life (for example, using categories such as adults and children, or working and retired). Three-stage models are also common and are often viewed as typical of modern life. The most common labels used are childhood, adulthood and old age, or pre-work, work and post-work. There are also modifications of three-stage models that bifurcate one of the stages in order to emphasize a particular aspect of that phase of life. Examples here are youth, adulthood, third age (young-old) and fourth age (old-old) constructed in order to emphasize the diversity of old age. In addition, there are models of psychological development across the life course, which tend to be weighted towards the early years (e.g. Erikson’s eight stages (Erikson, 1986)). However, questions have been raised about the value of stage-based models, especially in the context of ideas about the ‘de-standardization’ and greater fluidity of life course transitions.

Distinctions between the pre-modern, modern and postmodern have also been used to characterize some of the changes in the life course experienced in western society. In pre-modern times people were perceived as old at the age at which they ceased to be independent, economically or physically, with, in practice, wide variation between groups and individuals. It is argued that modern society, and in particular the institutions of large-scale industrial capitalism, urban living and the nation state, tend to produce a new series of uniformities in the life course. Retirement is a modern phenomenon and in the twentieth century it has come to dominate our thinking about and understanding of old age (Mann, 2001). However, Featherstone and Hepworth (1989), writing from a postmodernist perspective, suggest that the life course is becoming progressively de-structured. Common social patterns determined by chronological age are becoming less important to people’s life experience.

Another set of distinctions cluster around use of the term ‘generations’ and ‘cohorts’. The term ‘generation’ is as evocative as it is imprecise, having at least three meanings. First and primary is generation as ranked placement within a family lineage. Individuals within a lineage occupy, shape and are influenced by multiple roles that are bound by norms of expectations, obligation and reciprocity. Secondly, at the macrosocial level, the term is used to refer to age groups: cohorts of people born at approximately the same time who experience the same historical changes at about the same stage of life. Issues of primary concern at the macrosocial level of age-cohort relations include public-resource allocation, citizens’ expectations of government, and government’s expectations of its citizens.

A third meaning is that of ‘historical generations’. Karl Mannheim (1952) linked the process of the formation of succeeding generations to social change. He argued that those who live through a period of rapid social change (e.g. the ‘Depression Generation’) develop a distinct ‘historical–social conscience’ or collective identity which influences their attitudes and behaviours and distinguishes them from preceding generations. Age cohorts that are so transformed have left, at every life stage, an indelible mark on both its members and on the society through which they passed (Alwin and McCammon, 2003).

Thinking about old age in the future requires anticipation of the impact of specific generations. Those who are now 35 will be 65 in 30 years’ time and will bring with them the experiences and culture of their generation. That generational set of knowledge and values means that they experience growing old in new ways. An important question tackled in Part I is: how will the generations of the future change the nature and understanding of old age? The cohort born in the postwar baby-boom in the late 1940s and early 1950s, who experienced the changes in social conventions of the 1960s and 1970s, may not accept the conventional view of old age as conservative and dependent but might seek expression in later life of the sexual liberation, lifestyle experimentation and cultural innovation of their teenage years. One social repercussion of differing cohort experience is sometimes referred to as a ‘generation gap’. Although that term originated to describe differences between parents and teenagers, it may well describe the future cultural gulf between those retired and those in work.

How will the third age develop or change? What new divisions in the last part of the life course will emerge? Will older people be increasingly differentiated by wealth and class? What cultural and lifestyle changes can be anticipated? Postmodern approaches emphasize that modern affluence produces a redefinition of old age and creates new cultural agendas based on consumer choice (Gilleard and Higgs, 2000). A significant minority of older people at the end of the twentieth century have financial security unprecedented in the history of the modern west. Set against this, older people in Britain remain among the poorest in the community and may experience exclusion from important areas of social life (Scharf et al., 2002). Power, wealth and economic opportunity vary across time and differentially impact on different generations. Indeed, the increasing differentials between cohorts in terms of their actual and potential access to good opportunities and lifestyles, not least their access to good pensions, has led some to suggest the possibility for increasing conflict between generations. This is sometimes phrased as: ‘Will the next, less numerous, generation be willing to pay increased pensions to the retired when the prospects that they themselves will receive a pension are diminishing?’

The questions identified above aim to introduce the reader to a variety of developments affecting the organization of the life course and highlight a range of possible futures for growing old as experienced through different generations and cohorts.¹

Note

---

1 The editors wish to acknowledge the contribution of Vern Bengtson and Norella M. Putney to this introduction.

One	Visions of Later Life: Golden Cohort to Generation Z

Andrew Blaikie

Demography does much to produce cultural shifts, albeit inadvertently. Newman’s poem ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ (1866) describes the death of an old man, following his soul into the afterlife. Its popularity was second only to Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ (1850), an elegy for a youngster of great promise taken in his early prime. Today this Victorian fascination with death and religion, promulgated in no small fashion by the Queen’s obsessive mourning for Prince Albert, finds little resonance as extended life expectancy pledges greater fulfilment in the here-and-now. Our point of reference has shifted from the brevity of existence and its long aftermath to sustaining ourselves within the good long life. If death was the grand indulgence of our forebears, its status has been usurped by concern for the earthly future, the spiritual dimension eclipsed by matters of physical, psychological and financial well-being. The modern life course, rational, secularized and individualistic, has severed ties with the mystic order of things, and while postmodernity may yet offer possibilities to reconnect with the infinite, these remain limited by social frames of being, the constraints that class, gender, ethnicity, health status, socialization, education and age itself place upon our cultural imagination (Cole, 1992). Different people have different visions, depending on their location within the social system, a fact that directs attention towards generational tensions as much as social inequalities.

What makes the twentieth century and after unprecedented is the remarkable increase in longevity. This ‘startling step change’ is already evident in the surviving Golden Cohort (born 1918–45), who are living far longer than their predecessors, and the rise will become more rapid. The mushrooming proportion of society in the post-55 age ranges prompts talk no longer of old age, but of two observable categories of mid and later life: the third age of leisure and personal fulfilment, and the fourth age of decline and decrepitude (Laslett, 1987). While sequential, in that decline is an end stage of life, this division is not common to all, for while a majority of baby-boomers (born 1945–65) can look forward to a long span of healthy retirement and a mercifully brief final phase, fulfilment is dependent on rather more than simple longevity (Evandrou, 1997). So long as fourth-agers remain perceived as a ‘burden of dependency’ on the welfare system and third-agers as ‘greedy baby-boomers’ enjoying their leisure, tensions of the workers-versus-pensioners type will persist. Normal ageing is only problematic where we assume a particular institutionalization of the life course, namely the reified modernist chronology to which we are accustomed, equating education with childhood, adulthood with work, and old age with retirement. Yet although free-thinking futurologists suggest a collapsing of these ‘three boxes of life’, with breaks taken from work to enjoy extended leisure, or periods of ‘retirement’ interspersed with education, retraining and new careers, such liberation will only be for the privileged few so long as the vast majority remain trapped by the constraints of the ‘work society’ (Best, 1980; Kohli, 1988).

Retirement: pensions crisis or lifestyle opportunity?

---

Policymakers and theorists have tended to the opinion that there is little point in attempting to deconstruct an elephant when it is fast charging straight at us. In the 1940s, when Britain faced a declining birth rate, the Titmusses warned: ‘We are up against something fundamental, something vast and almost terrifying in its grim relentless development. We cannot expect to muddle through.’ Arguing that a ‘process of the domination of old age and its interests has already been developing for some years’, they claimed the country would soon need to produce ‘armchairs and bedroom slippers instead of children’s foods’ while an ageing society would ‘lose the mental attitude that is essential for social progress … The future … will require greater intelligence, courage, power of initiative, and qualities of creative imagination … qualities … not usually to be found in the aged’ (Titmuss and Titmuss, 1942: 56, 47, 46). Their fears were unfounded, yet subsequent policy history is replete with generational misgivings. During the late 1980s, the panic took a swipe at third-agers, one journalist claiming: ‘All over the developed world, the recently-retired are enjoying a golden age. Though governments everywhere are trimming back on welfare, so far most cuts and extra contributions have fallen on the young and early middle-aged; their pensioner-parents have preserved their benefits largely intact’ (Wilshier, 1989). No less alarmist have been the fears expressed over the fourth age. A symposium, ‘The Impending Crisis of Old Age’, talked of a serious problem ‘already casting an unmistakable shadow over the National Health Service (NHS)’, namely ‘the marked increase in the numbers of the very elderly and frail people which will occur in Britain in the next 20 years’ (Shegog, 1981: 11). That happened, but the NHS (and a greatly expanded private care sector) continues to cope despite considerable pressures. More recently, the Pensions Commission (2004b) reported that present arrangements will not provide for those retiring in a decade’s time. The 17 million British baby-boomers face a stark choice: increased taxation, working longer, accepting reduced living standards or saving more (The Stationery Office (TSO), 2004). The new century is already witnessing a return to the former gloomy portrayal, entailing a shift ‘from living in a fool’s paradise to living in a sensible purgatory’ (Marr, 2004).

Through its century or so of existence the idea of retirement has been reinvented several times. The common parameter has been that of workending: retirement has been defined more by what it is not – work – than by what it is. Yet elders become trapped in a moral and motivational bind, where although leisure practices increasingly become the location for self-identification, these practices are themselves analogous to forms of work. The continuing hegemony of the work ethic, identified in the characterization of ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 1983) and ‘body work’ (Gimlin, 2002), is also evident in the earnest pursuit of retirement activities whereby a ‘busy ethic’ legitimates leisure as worthy rather than simply indulgent, and staying healthy or youthful demands that people ‘work at’ maintaining their bodies (Ekerdt, 1986). Thus leisure consumption in retirement is driven by similar imperatives to production during work time, provoking two questions: should employers reconsider how people might carry on working as they age; and, if older people do not continue to work, what meaningful role can capitalist societies conceive for this increasingly dominant age group? Both issues concern social integration: the first shifts attention from the rhetoric of pensions crisis to a problematization of work; the second raises the big question of the meaning of the life course in the contemporary world.

Since Generation X (born 1965–80) is less than two-thirds their size, forthcoming labour shortages could mean that many baby-boomers will be unable to retire. Or it may become increasingly practical to treat retirement as a gradual and flexible process rather than a ritualized event. With the ‘babybust’ already contributing to a skills shortage, it is logical that firms continue to tap the knowledge and experience of older employees by reducing incentives to early retirement. For employers, this could ease the financial burden of maintaining pension schemes while responding to anti-ageism legislation. Meanwhile, owing to the reduced value of occupational pensions, many employees will need to stay in work longer. Phased retirement schemes thus appeal on grounds of both demand and supply. If these become widespread, it will mean the rethinking of career trajectories, away from working up the ladder and reaching the top before retiring to gradual withdrawal from senior positions and, perhaps, re-entry into work after retirement.

It would be misleading, however, to concentrate on work as entirely deterministic in a consumer culture where identities depend less on what one does than how one lives. Modernity did much to devalue the status of the old. Because people are retired it is often assumed that they are no longer making a productive contribution. However, in a consumerist, late-modern environment they are increasingly important as purchasers of goods signifying particular lifestyles. Driven by the urge to remain forever youthful, the third-age habitus embraces ‘positive ageing’ through the pursuit of health, while enhanced cultural capital demands attention to body maintenance and the consumption of symbolic goods (Featherstone and Hepworth, 1986). ‘Midlifestylism’ accentuates choice and innovation – in clothing, cosmetics, exercise regimes, residence, pastimes – which are designed to combat ageing itself (Harkin and Huber, 2004). Although the requirements to work at staying sexually active, fit and self-reliant may be construed as imperative rather than liberating, refusal to engage the resources now available, for the sake of ageing ‘naturally’, could be seen as equally perverse.

The forms of later life once institutionalized through retirement are becoming deinstitutionalized, with individual elders increasingly negotiating paths through a multiplicity of choices. Such opportunities – or risks – come at the price of reduced welfare benefits as citizenship becomes more reliant on possessing sufficient financial and corporeal capital. Those lacking income or transferable skills are restricted to state or charity provision, while in the fourth age the bioethical position becomes fraught. While the sanctity of human life is a moral priority supported by law, questions of public versus private care and the possible rationing of expenditure according to principles of age-based triage point to difficult matters of potential generation disharmony (Binstock and Post, 1991). In Germany, where state pensions have risen by 30 per cent since 1970, the youth section of the Christian Democrats recently demanded, ‘it’s about time you 65-year-olds started paying for your own hip replacements’ (Cohen, 2004). Such activism and invective could be just the beginning. Yet ironically population ageing has swayed voting power away from Generation X to their parents, whose numbers and electoral turnout have both been considerably higher. However, the grey vote remains highly fragmented and far from being simply self-interested, many, unsurprisingly, have their children’s and grandchildren’s interests at heart. This would question the conflict thesis.

The academics’ dilemma

---

Turner defines a generation as ‘a cohort of persons passing through time who come to share a common habitus and lifestyle’. Speculation about the future of class consciousness, racial awareness or sexual understandings would reasonably begin by considering the ways of seeing class, ethnic or gendered groups. By the same token, collective world views can be interpreted as belonging to generations. Moreover, because each generation bears ‘a strategic temporal location [sic] to a set of resources as a consequence of historical accident and exclusionary practices of social closure’, intergenerational differences are not merely ideological, but can have significant material effects, as with changing welfare polices (Turner, 1998: 302). Nevertheless, in the absence of systematic longitudinal data, comparing the effects of generational histories upon retirement experiences is necessarily speculative (Wadsworth, 1991).

The problem is compounded by the limited vision of sociological inquiry, which has yet to delineate a space for cultures of ageing equivalent to that enjoyed by youth culture, a fact that binds academic discourse itself firmly within the constraints of baby-boom thinking. The very genesis of cultural studies in the youth revolt of the 1960s ensured ageing was constituted as the distant but conservative ‘other’. Academic discourse unquestioningly imbibed an essentialism that equated ageing with the languishing of that rebellious attitude seen as fundamental to social evolution. While echoing the views of the 1930s, yet failing to recognize their somewhat illiberal implications, a generation of social researchers disregarded the significance of a major societal phenomenon that paradoxically reflected the decline of youth itse...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Future of the Life Course
• Part II The Future of Social Differentiation
• Part III The Future of Retirement and Pensions
• Part IV The Future for ‘Self’ in Old Age
• Part V The Future for Health and Well-being in Old Age
• Part VI The Future of Family and Living Arrangements for Older People
• Part VII Globalization and the Future of Old Age
• References
• Index