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BOOK REVIEW |
Professor of Sociology University of Florida Gainesville, Florida 32611
The Crown of Life: Dynamics of the Early Postretirement Period (Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics, Vol. 26), edited by Jacquelyn Boone James and Paul Wink. Springer Publishing Company, New York, 2007, 336 pp., $58.00 (cloth).
The Experience of Retirement, by Robert S. Weiss. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2005, 213 pp., $45.00 (cloth), 18.95 (paper).
Aristotle (2007) summarizes one view of aging: "They live by memory rather than by hope; for what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past." Today, marketers, financial providers, and journalists are creating a new narrative of old age, one that Aristotle wouldn't recognize. "Active adult" communities are replacing "retirement" communities, and the end of employment is increasingly advertised as an opportunity to reinvent one's life, make new commitments, seek adventure, and achieve meaning. Gone is the focus on reminiscence, frailty, poverty, decline, and death. It has been replaced by an emphasis on creativity, achievement, prosperity, and good health.
In academic gerontology, these ideas are paralleled by the division of old age into two stages: the Third Age, a period of creativity and personal fulfillment after retirement from work but before infirmity; and the Fourth Age, a period characterized by illness, physical and mental decline, and death. This idea is far from new, and gerontologists will recognize its seed in the earlier distinction between young-old and the old-old. The Third Age is a further elaboration of these ideas, and in their introduction to The Crown of Life, editors Jacquelyn Boone James and Paul Wink point out that this particular conceptualization was first developed in Europe rather than North America. These editors link the concept to a changing popular conceptualization of old age as well as diverse threads in the gerontology research literature. They point to Moody's (2002) argument that there is an affinity between the Third Age concept and times of prosperity when optimism is high, and they pose the question of whether the concept is equally congenial to a time when public and private funding is scarce, and the popular sentiment about the future is less positive.
The concept of the Third Age is more than the descriptive definition of the young-old and old-old because in many of its manifestations it combines empirical questions about the health and economic status of those entering retirement with a set of values focusing on reinvention and achievement. It is ironic that the concept originated in Europe because there is a strong affinity between the American cultural emphasis on youth and bountiful opportunity and the Third Age's emphasis on reinvention and a new beginning. As James and Wink make clear, the values implicit in the Third Age have not gone unchallenged, and they point to several alternative conceptualizations. For example, good health and adequate income might simply allow a satisfying continuation of earlier commitments instead of self-evaluation and reinvention.
The issues posed by the juxtaposition of the Third and Fourth Ages are compelling at two levels. For individuals approaching retirement, the question is whether they will experience the promise of the Third Age, and thus must ponder their possible longevity, health trajectory, income, and sources of commitment as well as manage all the psychological and social aspects of a major life transition. At the aggregate or societal level, very similar questions arise, though phrased differently. What proportion of the older population is a candidate for the creative period implied by the Third Age? Is that proportion growing in successive cohorts? That is, who in a cohort approaching retirement will be able to retire while in good health, with the disposable income and other benefits that free the individual to pursue meaningful activity? There is good evidence that there is more inequality in a cohort after retirement than before. To the extent that future cohorts become more dependent on unequal sources of income, such as employment-related pensions or private saving, and less dependent on more universal sources such as Social Security, it is likely that there will be more inequality and more differentiated opportunities among those entering retirement. (Crystal & Johnson 1998; O'Rand & Henretta 1999; Henretta 2001).
A different issue is the extent to which a given society provides opportunities for meaningful commitment after retirement (e.g., Riley & Foner 1994). For example, there are some press reports of ways that today's retirees are actually effecting changes in the opportunity structure that allow them to utilize their time in new, creative, and meaningful ways, such as payment for part-time volunteer work (Deutsch 2007). We don't know, however, whether this flexibility will become widespread, leaving open the question of whether there are potential Third Agers who are unable to find opportunities for creative commitment to meaningful activity after retirement. Thus, the concept of the Third Age, albeit vague, suggests a very large research agenda as well as the need to define precisely what is meant by it.
The Individual Perspective
The two books reviewed in this essay, while worlds apart in their method and structure, both address some of the issues relevant to the Third Age. Robert Weiss' The Experience of Retirement does not utilize the Third Age framework. Nonetheless, it is highly relevant to assessing the potential of Third Age because it addresses some of the individual issues implicit in the Third Age concept. It is particularly valuable because it deals with the problems as well as opportunities of retirement. The author notes that "all retirees face the same two challenges of retirement: to manage its threat of marginality and to utilize its promise of freedom" (p. 14). How could one better summarize the task facing individuals entering the Third Age?
Weiss' research is based on a sample of 89 retirees, with an intentional overrepresentation of middle class occupations—approximately three-quarters were in professional or managerial occupations. About 60 percent were male, and 80 percent were married. There does not appear to be ethnic variation in this small sample. Weiss uses a qualitative methodology in which he allows his respondents to define subjectively the nature and meaning of their experiences. The book has chapters on Reasons for Retirement, The Departure from Work, Gains and Losses, Money, Social Isolation, Using the Time of Retirement, Marriage and Family, and A Good Retirement. A concluding chapter distills advice from the rest of the book.
While it portrays positive as well as negative experiences, the overall impression is that this book is less an invitation to the promise of the Third Age than a warning about the things that can go wrong. For example, chapter three, Gains and Losses, devotes about 11 pages to losses due to retirement and about 5 pages to gains. Losses from retirement include such things as loss of the structure of the day and the work week, loss of a sense of community, and loss of the source of one's identity. The gains are freedom from stress and the freedom to use one's time.
Chapter two, Departure from Work, devotes 5 pages to the story of Mr. Ulrich, a project manager at a financial institution. Ulrich had planned his retirement carefully and decided to retire when he did. Yet, the whole process is tinged with sadness and a sense of loss. After deciding to retire, but while still working, his days are filled with the minutiae of pension and health insurance arrangements, a feeling of growing marginality, and mixed feelings about the future. Mr. Ulrich's story is a potent warning for those in professional or administrative jobs who are heavily invested in their work and derive meaning and identity from it. The middle-class character of the sample may be an issue here because it is likely to include a higher proportion of persons for whom an occupation provides a major source of identity. This account is probably less applicable to those for whom retirement signals a reduction in stress from physical demands and whose identity is primarily derived from family or community.
Many respondents portrayed here struggle with the challenges of leaving work and finding a satisfactory way of living. Are the problems posed by retirement really different from those experienced earlier in life? If one were to write a book about adjustment to college, it might be filled with accounts of anxiety, uncertainty, and loss of close connection with family. Or, it might be full of the promise of creating a new life. Both are there, and anxiety and loss are the price to be paid for a new opportunity. Of course, there are poor outcomes in college, and some students drop out and never return. Retirement may be unique because, as Mr. Ulrich said, "You're walking down the last corridor" (p. 75), and it may be different because the retiree has spent a lifetime discovering a way of living that he or she finds satisfactory. But in some other ways retirement is very much like earlier transitions—full of difficulties as well as potential.
The book includes one extended narrative that illustrates this potential for a fully successful Third Age. Mr. Gilbert, the subject of the chapter A Good Retirement, goes from success to success in his life. After mentoring his successor and selling his business to his employees, Gilbert left his old identity without regret. He enrolled in a two-year woodworking class and became a skilled craftsman, gaining joy from his work and selling many of his products at a discount.
Overall, this book would be very useful as a handbook to anyone contemplating retirement—particularly to those who hope or expect that retirement will open a positive new chapter in their lives— because it lays out in stark form the challenges they will face. Are they ready to accept being marginalized? From what do they derive their identity, and if from work, how will they adjust to the loss of that role? What activities will give meaning to their lives? What will be the accomplishments of their retirement period? Forewarned is forearmed, and anyone who hopes and expects positive commitment and meaning to emerge from retirement should read and learn a lesson from the narratives of individual retirement experience found in The Experience of Retirement.
Diverse Studies of Early Old Age
The Crown of Life is part of the Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics series and includes chapters covering a diverse set of issues, all organized around an explicit Third Age theme. There are three primary analytic approaches represented. Some chapters use cross-sectional data to answer questions about age differences in a particular period; others use panel data to examine aging in one cohort over time; while still others present a cross-cohort comparison. A number of chapters combine more than one of these analytic approaches. There is similar diversity in outcomes examined, which range from attitudes, cognition, and depression to employment, income, and daily life. The analyses use a range of data sets, some of them based on local samples. It is difficult to reach definitive comprehensive conclusions from such a diverse set of papers, so rather that summarize all the different themes, I will focus on some of the findings that directly address cohort change. The analysis of cohort change addresses the hypothesis that the Third Age is becoming more available to recent cohorts because they (or the social structure in which they live) has changed. The cohort change hypothesis is particularly intriguing because it has the potential of providing insight into social change brought about by cohort succession and structural change.
In their contribution, "Functioning and Well-Being in the Third Age: 1986–2001," Irina Grafova, Katherine McGonagle, and Frank P. Stafford use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to present a number of comparisons, the most relevant of which compare characteristics of successive cohorts. Comparing different cohorts in the age groups under 50, 50–64, 65–79 and 80 and over in 1986 and 2001, they find successive cohorts have generally better self-evaluated health, are less likely to be smokers, but are more likely to be obese. Equally important for assessing the potential for the Third Age, they find that financial and home equity wealth increased greatly over the period, particularly among the 65–79 year age group that the volume defines as the Third Age group.
In "A Coconstructionist View of the Third Age: The Case of Cognition," Sherry K. Willis and K. Warner Schaie present data on cohort differences in late-life cognition, including two measures of fluid intelligence and three measures of crystallized intelligence, from several cohorts born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. They present convincing evidence of increasing levels of cognitive functioning on all five measures in successive cohorts. While there are declines with age, each successive cohort starts at a higher level and maintains that advantage across ages 60–74.
While both of these chapters suggest a positive change in the Third Age population in successive cohorts, the chapter, "The Work and Retirement Experiences of Aging Black Americans" by Edna Brown, James S. Jackson, and Nakesha A. Faison, is not as sanguine. The major focus of their analysis is retirement status, and they compare different cohorts of Black elders at three points spanning 1979–80 to 2003. Their main finding is that the longstanding pattern of non-retirement (defined as not working or working less than 20 hours per week and providing reasons for this pattern that are other than retired) among older Blacks continues. In this pattern, many older Blacks—particularly single women—remain underemployed and are caught in a situation in which they lack adequate resources to retire but have a low income from work. While 50–64 year-olds in 2003 were less likely to fall in this pattern compared to earlier cohorts, there is no time trend among successive cohorts of 65–79 year-olds. While these authors find some evidence of positive change, the overall message of this chapter is continued disadvantage.
Summaries of these three chapters suggest the ways that multiple contributions to this volume can be used to address specific analytic questions about the Third Age. As with most edited volumes, however, readers will come to it for one or a few of the contributions. The editors have done a good job of holding the authors to the Third Age theme, and they provide an introduction with critical evaluation of the Third Age concept. But, with such a range of research questions, strategies, methods, and data, the volume remains a set of largely independent contributions, though each is interesting in its own right.
Concluding Thoughts
The Third Age conceptualization of retirement brings together a number of threads. It involves, first of all, the intersection of a major life transition within a changing society. While a greater proportion of more recent cohorts entering retirement have the financial, health, and cognitive resources necessary to engage in meaningful retirement activity, as individuals they still must manage a reorientation of their daily activities and, possibly, their commitments. The conceptualization is particularly complex because this process is overlaid with two other themes. As with earlier gerontological theories, such as disengagement and activity theory, the Third Age concept also involves a particular view of a successful retirement. This view is consistent with the current Zeitgeist, but may not stand the test of time. Finally, the potential of the Third Age does not reside just in the resourcefulness of individuals in managing their own transition to meaningful activity. It resides primarily in social structural arrangements that foster or hinder a creative retirement. The two books reviewed here are welcome additions to the growing literature addressing aspects of the very large research agenda implied by the Third Age.
References
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