Abstract
Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations has named ageing (alongside climate change) as one of the two ‘big issues’ of our times. Governments worry about how to keep their citizens working into old age, while many organizations continue to equate youth with dynamism and discriminate against older workers. As a result individuals are encouraged to embrace the idea that 40 is the new 30 and are held morally responsible for masking the signs of ageing. Ageing has become a master discourse and so a book that asks why age has been socially constructed in the way that it has is most timely and welcome.
Stephen Fineman’s Organizing Age moves us beyond a view of ageing as merely chronological age to an understanding that age is ‘laden with political and moral import, reflecting particular contexts and times’ (p. 3). Fineman’s main focus is on age and ageing in organizations, however, as he says he ‘cannot divorce organizations from their societal and cultural context, where the “organizing” of age is rooted: societal boundaries are pororus’ (p. 4). Proceeding from this perspective Fineman draws on academic material from psychology, medicine, sociology, social history, organization studies, management and gerontology interspersed with material from popular culture and personal testimonies, including his own, to explore how and why age matters.
Fineman shows that age matters because of the way it intersects with other social systems, including gender, race and ethnicity. I would add class too which Fineman touches on in a few places throughout the book but does not deal with explicitly. Age also matters because it is a malleable discursive resource that can be used or abused and is impossible to ignore despite our best attempts at times. I was reminded of this when I called a friend recently to wish her a belated happy birthday. She said, ‘oh don’t worry about forgetting, I’m not having birthdays anymore’. Her declaration highlights a general ambivalence that we feel towards age and the fact that age designations (marked by those birthdays my friend is so keen to avoid) are not neutral: ‘they compress and impress ways of feeling, thinking, and understanding about a person, issue, organization or society’ (p. 3).
Fineman begins by showing how societal age-consciousness has accelerated over time. This he argues is the result of the intertwining of age and the modern state, which is the result of age being a key metric in an ever increasing culture of audit and because age, especially chronological age, has served the modern corporation so well. It is the advent of the corporation in the early- and mid-20th century that created the prototypical career/life cycle that provided organizations and predominately male workers with the order and calculability whereby success could be measured. This appropriation of age by the modern corporation is one of the reasons why age norms are gendered and so often demand different behaviour and appearances from women and men (p. 22).
Age norms have spawned whole industries aimed at celebrating or denying the effects of ageing and it is this ‘age work’ that Fineman explores in the second chapter of his book. It is in this chapter that we get clear insights into why my friend wants to ignore her birthday. As Gullette (1997) writes, it is at mid-age that we first become aged by culture and Fineman draws on Gullette’s (2004) work to show how this ageing by culture is indelibly tainted by ‘a narrative of decline’ (p. 26). In consumption terms this narrative of decline is invariably accompanied by a discourse of ‘anti-decline’. Fineman reminds us that the ‘anti-ageing industry’ is not a new phenomenon, sharing with his reader advertisements, ideas and potions from the 1950s. However, it is an industry that has greatly extended its reach promising to ‘camouflage, arrest, or even reverse the manifestations of ageing’ (p. 28). It is an industry that feeds on our anxieties about ageing and plays on the dissonance that we might feel between our actual age and our felt age. Fineman highlights the ways in which our ‘subjective age has a habit of being out of sync with our chronological age’ and how this impacts on the way we perform age (pp. 30–31). These ideas really resonated with research I have done with both mid-age men and women who shared ‘fateful moments’ (Giddens, 1990) when they realized that the way they saw themselves was not the way that others saw them. It was at these moments when they started to take in the messages of the anti-ageing industry and engage in what Biggs (1997) calls ‘age masking’. There are, of course, limits to this masking and in my research with mid-age women I discovered that there can be a lot of social approbation of those who get the masking wrong. Across a range of focus groups women talk about the dread of being seen as ‘mutton dressed as lamb’. Age then is a performance that is socially regulated. This regulation is at its most potent in talk between and about ‘generations’. This is the title of the third chapter in Fineman’s book and here he critiques generational categories of Gen X, Gen Y, Baby Boomers first used by marketers which have now spilt over into all aspects of our lives. I have used the material in this book to open up conversations with my senior undergraduate students about the age discrimination they face when they are labelled as ‘typical Gen Ys’: you know the ‘it is all about them generation’. Here Fineman reminds us that age stereotyping and age discrimination happens across generations and points out that there is ‘something of a self-fulfilling prophecy in dividing populations according to preconceived segments and then explaining any differences on the basis of these preconceptions’ (p. 53). Such segmenting and stereotyping is of course at the heart of ‘ageism’ (chapter 4) and in this chapter Fineman makes important links between ageism and other social categories, most notably gender. There is some really interesting material here drawing on both research and personal anecdotes from feminist colleagues and friends who reflect on finding themselves buying into the anti-ageing message and the ‘not looking your age’ mantra despite themselves. This is not to suggest that men are not also subject to the same gaze of youth but such attention does not seem to challenge other aspects of their identity in the same way as women.
Fineman’s book changes gear in his next chapter on ‘capturing age cohorts’. Here the focus is on young people in detention, child labour and old people suffering dementia. In exploring these age cohorts Fineman wants to shine a light on people who are largely invisible to the rest of society. Here the organization of age meets social justice concerns and issues of morality. It is in relation to child labour that the issues of social justice and morality seem most clear cut, yet Fineman reminds us of the complexity of the political, familial and cultural practices that circulate around these issues. He uses the case of child football stitchers in Pakistan to show how intervention which simply takes children out of the equation can leave those children and their families much worse off. These very same issues were raised during Grand Final fever in Australia this year when it was disclosed that footballs to be distributed to sponsors and guests during the Rugby League grand final had been hand stitched by children in India. Sherrin, the football manufacturer, immediately cancelled contracts with its Indian manufacturers. The media reporting linked child labourers in India with a young Melbourne boy who was injured by a needle left in a ball and highlighted the huge gulf that exists between the experiences of a football playing child in Australia and a child football stitcher in India. All of this is a powerful reminder that age and age norms are context specific and that what is so often missing from our debates, campaigns and inquiries into issues such as juvenile justice, child labour and dementia care are the voices of the young people, children and dementia sufferers. As Fineman writes, these age cohorts are invariably represented as ‘passive and voiceless and rarely as meaning-makers in their own right’ (p. 96).
One age cohort whose voices seem to get a lot of air play are ‘retirees’ and Fineman devotes a chapter, perhaps appropriately at the end of his book, to ‘retirement’. Fineman reminds us that retirement is a 20th century invention and that we need to understand it as a social construct rooted in localized practises. As life expectancy increases the way that retirement is constructed is changing. The most obvious manifestation of this is the pushing out of the pension age in most developed economies and along with this shifts in the onus of responsibility for care in retirement from the state to the individual (p. 108). Such shifts in policy will be experienced very differently by those whose work relies on physical strength (e.g. labouring, nursing) as opposed to those engaged in more cerebral work. Indeed while images of retirees are heterogeneous—invariably glamorous, silver haired, smiling, heterosexual couples—experiences of retirement are highly fragmented. Fineman documents a range of experiences and reasons why individuals retire and the tensions that arise for them when they are faced with ‘having to live up to a public representation of what retirement should be like, and the lingering, private, imprint of a previous work identity’. Here all of Fineman’s anecdotes and examples are of men and I wondered if this is because in retirement men have to make sense of their ageing identity without the support of a work-based identity upon which so much of their sense of masculinity is buttressed. As Fineman observes; ‘the niceties of pension pots and life savings, as important as they are, can obscure the complexity of retirement’s meanings to individuals’ (p. 129).
The question that Fineman poses at the end of the chapter on retirement: ‘Is it time to shift our thinking about the relationship between work and retirement and, indeed, the very validity of retirement as a construct?’ (p. 130) encapsulates what is really good about this book. Fineman offers us a broad brush view of the way in which age is socially constructed and proffers some simulating questions that could help frame new research into the organization of ageing or deepen existing investigations. I have been pondering whether to send my girlfriend who is giving up on birthdays a copy of Fineman’s book in the hope that she might want to celebrate her next birthday with a couple of glasses of bubbly. Not sure if it will do the trick, but for students, academics and policy makers who are interested in exploring age beyond a simplistic view of age as chronological and generational markers then this is a ‘must read’.