The New Retirement Agenda

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The ancient Chinese curse 'may you live in interesting times' seems to be being applied to social gerontology. All Western economies have been experiencing several inter-related trends: falling labour force participation rates among males in their late 50s and early 60s, raising the question of whether 'welfare to work' compulsion will soon be applied to them; fears over population ageing after the second decade of the 21st century, with worsening gerontic dependency ratios; the problem of how to 'reform' state pensions, to achieve the seemingly-impossible task of both reducing costs and providing adequate cover for the growing number of citizens who will find themselves in die low-paid, casualised periphery of the labour market; and the likelihood of increased disability and chronic illness levels among the larger numbers of 'oldest old'. Yet social gerontologists have risen to the challenge posed by these trends. Never has the literature on old age and ageing been so interesting, and these three books represent thoughtful and intelligent responses to questions that often invite ill-considered, apocalyptic answers. John Vincent brings to the study of ageing a delightfully broad and eclectic approach, encompassing sociology, gerontology, anthropology and demography. His book is written with exceptional clarity, and will find itself gratefully welcomed by both undergraduates and academic researchers (many of whom will envy his stylistic elegance). His aim is to trace the mechanisms by which inequalities of age operate in modern societies and subject old people to social devaluation. Age discriminations are difficult to separate out from those age classifications we all deploy in order to make sense of the world yet age operates as a powerful (and often unacknowledged) component of structured inequality. Again, no simple theory can tease apart the biological processes of ageing from the social and con textual. What we do know is that old people experience marked income reductions in old age (Vincent demonstrates this by showing income variations across the life course), exacerbated by gender, class and ethnicity. However, this status devaluation is not necessarily a product of modernisation: Vincent offers some interesting anthropological examples (from his own researches) to show how complex age stratifications have been in non-industrial societies. Subsequent chapters explore the newer 'life course approach' in social gerontology (which is not without its problems), postmodern theories of ageing, the elusive goal of an 'age-irrelevant' society, representations of old age in language and