Introduction [Social class in later life : power, identity and lifestyle]

Abstract

Social class in later life: Power, identity and lifestyle includes three strategic objectives - namely, theory, research and policy. First, the book provides a critical overview of the competing approaches and rationales underlying the explanation of the class relations in later life. Nowadays, it is not just increased longevity that has had an impact on the character if population ageing. Various social and cultural currents - ranging from ‘senior’ life-style consumerism to bodily transformation - have multiplied the agentic options open to older people so that their lives are no longer bound by strict social, economic and biological reference points. The result is a blurring of the traditional life stages and a homogenizing of aspirations in later life to what Featherstone and Hepworth identified early on in the debate as ‘mid-lifestyles’ that are maintained for as long as possible and sometimes deep into old age. This has major implications for the understanding of class dynamics in later life, and chapters will demonstrate that rather than calling for the class concept to be written off as an artefact of a superseded form of social organisation, it is more sensible to perceive it as a social category in need of considerable re-articulation. A second objective is to illustrate the unequal worlds that older people from various class backgrounds experience. These chapters will present empirical data that demonstrates how retirement reflects the advantages and disadvantages of class position in relation to resources and quality of life. Individual chapters will highlight what the relationship between class, ownership of financial capital, savings and occupational pensions, participation in various social activities, and caring, living with children, being in residential care, having extensive and stable social networks, and physical and psychological well-being. A final objective is to illuminate the interconnection between class dynamics in later life and public policy for older persons. It addresses the paradox that while many retirees have benefited from the structures and stability of a first modernity, their current circumstances are much more contingent on what Beck calls the ‘side effect principle’, where decisions that affect their situations and opportunities are often the consequences of decisions and structures placed well outside nation state boundaries. Nowhere is this true than in the financing of retirement, where shifts in the global economy have had dramatic effects on the values of stocks and shares that underpin the profitability of pension funds, as well as reducing the rates of return on savings that many older people rely upon for important parts of their retirement income. For instance, in relation to health there is now a complex picture of the inter-relationships between income, health and disability. The ‘accumulation of disadvantage’ approach to health in later life has been contested in much the same way that the ‘compression of morbidity’ arguments have challenged the equation between chronological age and increased illness and infirmity. This is not to argue that there are no connections between earlier life course events and circumstances but rather to acknowledge that outcomes in later life might be as influenced by proximal influences as they are by distal ones. Chapters will address these debates but focus on the realisation that the changes that are occurring within later life are such that the conceptual tools of social policy of the past are no longer as effective as they once were and need modifying.