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a Department of Sociological Studies, The University of Sheffield, England
Correspondence: Alan Walker, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TU, United Kingdom. E-mail: a.c.walker{at}sheffield.ac.uk.
Decision Editor: Vernon L. Greene, PhD
The central theme of this brief contribution is that public policy has played (and continues to do so) a major role in determining the meaning of old age and, therefore, the extent of age integration and segregation. Old age has been constructed and reconstructed by social and economic policies and, for their part, older people have been expected to adjust to the reification of age into convenient social categories for the purpose of resource distribution and rationing; to the institutions of the welfare state set up to "manage" aging (the "aging enterprise"); and to the changing prescriptions of policy makers and professionals charged with their care. This is not to suggest that older people are the simple creatures of policy but, rather, that policy is a key component of an age structuration that leaves scope for active agency in the interpretation and reproduction of social reality. Older people interact with their environment in a reflexive way to create their own social reality. Futhermore, this policy context is set not only at the local and national levels but also by global agencies.
I will draw on European experience, specifically, the 15 Member States of the European Union (EU), to illustrate the key role of policy in determining the changing meaning and significance of age barriers and, therefore, the scope for age integration.
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Constructing and Reconstructing the Meaning of Old Age |
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Old Age as a Social Problem: 1940s–Early 1970s
In the years following World War II, aging became identified as a social problem. National pension systems were put in place and/or consolidated during this period, and social expenditure rose rapidly in what proved to be the heyday of the welfare state. Of course, the origins of social policy in the field of pensions predate this period by more than 50 years: Bismarck's system of worker insurance in Germany in 1889 and the first old-age pensions in the United Kingdom (UK) in 1908 and in France in 1910. However, universal coverage was achieved in this period, and there is no mistaking the proliferation of social policy measures. In the period 1960–1975 the increase in pension expenditure in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries accounted for one quarter of the rise in the share of public expenditure in total expenditure. In France it was more than one third, in Germany just under one fifth, and, in the UK, around one seventh (OECD 1988). This reinforces the conclusion of Pampel, Williamson, and Stryker 1990(p. 547) that there are "multiple paths to higher pension spending." Incidentally, in the period 1960–1975, pension spending in the United States contributed just over one third of the growth in the size of the public sector.
The main goals of public policy in this period were to provide for income security in old age and, in doing so, to ensure the efficient transition of older workers from employment to retirement. The early postwar period was one of full employment; indeed, in the early 1950s in the UK a National Advisory Committee on the Employment of Older Men and Women was formed to encourage older people to remain in the labor market (Phillipson 1982). While full employment lasted, there was some resistance to the assumptions of neoclassical economics and scientific management theories concerning declining productivity in older age (Taylor 1947). Thus, the main focus of public policy was on those who had left the labor market. This focus was determined largely by economic management and policy because this group was, in effect, defined as "externalities" by the macro-economic policy system. Public pensions were regarded as an appropriate way of socializing the costs of retirement as well as assisting industry to rejuvenate the workforce (Graebner 1980). This was an important element of the postwar settlement between Keynesian economics and Beveridge-style (i.e., liberal) social policy: It was intended that economic growth would generate sufficient resources for universal pension provision.
The establishment of public pension systems and, more importantly, their accompanying retirement conditions encouraged the rapid spread of fixed age retirement. Thus, in policy terms, old age came to be uniquely associated with retirement ages. In other words, old age was objectified as retirement age (Graebner 1980; Townsend 1981; Walker 1980). What are the consequences of the institutionalization of age-related retirement? There are five key points.
In the first place, the economic dependency of older people has been enlarged substantially. One hundred years ago in the UK, some two thirds of the male population aged 65 and over were economically active (in employment or seeking it); today it is only 7%. Older people were not helpless pawns in this social definition of old age. On the contrary, individually and collectively, workers called for retirement and public pensions. But the creation of a fixed age barrier in European pension systems has led to widespread economic dependency.
Second, age-barrier retirement has been the main wellspring of age discrimination in employment, social security, and in wider social relations (Bytheway 1995; McEwan 1990). It has not been the sole cause of age discrimination, but it has encouraged the view that, past a certain age, an individual's economic and social worth is diminished.
Third, as a corollary to retirement, it has been accepted that the income needs of older people are lower than those of the "economically active." Typically, public pensions are set at rates below and sometimes considerably below average earnings and, even when occupational pensions are included and idealized projections made, some leading EU countries still have quite low replacement ratios: 69% in Germany and 64% in the UK, for example (Walker, Guillemard, and Alber 1993).
Fourth, age-barrier retirement and these foregoing factors have encouraged the view that older people are not just a social problem but an economic burden as well. Thus, in this early postwar phase there were occasional warnings—for example, from the United Nations in 1954—about the "burden" of population aging (Walker 1990). This approach to aging is best exemplified in the old age dependency ratio, which crudely expresses a ratio between those over pension age and younger adults and, thereby, objectifies the assumption that economic dependency must be associated with aging. Such calculations are used frequently in European policy discourse in this field, despite their many flaws.
Fifth, with regard to health and social services policy and practice, it was this first phase that saw the major expansion of these services and their professionalization. Because policy makers had come to regard older people as largely dependent and passive objects, it is not surprising that the professional and institutional structures of the health and social services also tended to reflect this view: For example, some forms of education and training encouraged professionals to regard themselves as experts operating autonomously. Thus, the expansion of health and social services in this period was a two-sided coin: It enhanced the welfare of older people but it was delivered often in ways that reinforced their dependency and powerlessness. The professionalization of old age in the health and social services, therefore, is an important component of age segregation.
Old Age as the Solution to One Economic Problem and the Cause of Another: Mid 1970s–Late 1980s
This was actually a transitional phase, stretching from the origins of the fiscal crises in the mid-1970s to the late 1980s. During this relatively short space of time the social meaning of aging was reconstructed along two dimensions.
First, there was a massive fall in economic activity in later life throughout the EU and, indeed, all industrial countries with the exceptions of Sweden and Japan (Kohli, Rein, Guillemard, and Van Gunsteren 1991). The decline in activity is most marked among those aged 65 and over and those aged 60–64, but is also clear in the age group 55–59. In most EU countries, working after the age of 65 has been eradicated. The position of older women is harder to disentangle from the cohort effect of rising rates of participation among younger women, but it does appear that a similar decline has taken place (Walker et al. 1993).
The main factors explaining this decline in Europe are demand related, particularly the collapse of employment in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. My own research on early retirement following redundancy in the Sheffield steel industry shows two distinct paths being followed: (a) there were those who, faced with redundancy, chose early retirement as a preferable option to unemployment; (b) on the other hand, there were those who were effectively coerced into it by a hostile labor market. Thus, early retirement was, for the first group, a welcome release from employment and, for the second group, a refuge from an inhospitable labor market. The key explanatory factors in this social division were age (proximity to pension age) and income level (Westergaard, Noble, and Walker 1989).
Demand-related factors were the main causes of the rise of early retirement, and one of these main factors was public policy. During this period there was a proliferation of employment and pension measures designed to encourage early retirement. Examples include the Job Release Scheme in the UK and preretirement benefits in Denmark and Germany (Walker et al. 1993).
During this transitional phase, the growth of early retirement has reconstructed old age from a simple age-related status with a single lower entry point into a much broader category that stretches from age 50 to death. This has necessitated the widespread functional separation of the third (50–74) and fourth (75+) ages, the young-old and old-old, a distinction that first appeared in France in the 1960s. It has also meant, as Guillemard 1993 has shown, that public pension systems are no longer the key regulators of retirement. The traditional pattern of labor force exit at pension age has become a minority one; for example, in Germany (former FDR) and the UK, only about one third of entrants to the public pension system come directly from employment.
Another important consequence of the unchecked growth of early retirement from the labor force is that it has reinforced the devaluation of older people in the labor market. The downward redefinition of aging has had consequences for the ways that employers perceive older workers and, in turn, the chances they offer them for reemployment. Indeed, there is a growing body of evidence in different EU countries to show that older adults are frequently discriminated against with regard to job recruitment, promotions, and training (Drury 1993, Drury 1997; Walker 1997). This is despite the fact that age is not a good proxy for the ability to work and learn; therefore, discrimination is not only unjust but wasteful of economic capacity and potential.
The only EU-wide survey evidence on this topic comes from 1992 (Walker 1993). We asked the general public in each country whether or not older workers are discriminated against with regard to job recruitment and other aspects of employment. A remarkably high proportion—four out of five for the EU as a whole—said that such discrimination does exist with regard to recruitment. Moreover, there was hardly any difference based on the age of respondents: All age groups believed that discrimination takes place against older workers (Walker 1993).
During this second phase the social meaning of aging was transformed from its long association with pension ages to labor market criteria such as employability. Public policy, particularly in the employment sphere, was one of the main engines driving this change. But while encouraging early retirement was seen as a solution to unemployment (although the policy does not seem to have been very effective), aging also came to be seen as an economic problem in its own right. From the late 1970s onward, there has been mounting concern on the part of national governments about the economic consequences of population aging. Forward projections of dependency ratios have been used to paint a pessimistic picture of the socioeconomic implications of aging. Sometimes these border on the alarmist, as these quotations show.
Under existing regulations the evolution of public pension schemes is likely to put a heavy and increasing burden on the working population in coming decades. Such a financial strain may put intergenerational solidarity—a concept on which all public retirement provisions are based—at risk. (OECD 1988
If no action is taken to deal with the incipient crisis of population aging, then it seems certain that western societies will experience major social and economic dislocation, and they may experience this relatively soon. (Johnson, Conrad, and Thomson 1989
The question as to why international agencies and European governments should adopt an avowedly pessimistic stance toward the societal implications of population aging takes us beyond the scope of this discussion. What it illustrates is that neoclassical assumptions about the "burden" of aging held sway in national and international policy arenas (Walker 1990). In other words, the theory of old age that dominated public policy in this period was extremely pessimistic, economically.
The Late 1980s Onward—Integration or Segregation of Older People?
The transition from the second to the third phase of aging policy development was marked by the termination, in the late 1980s, of some of the main mechanisms for early retirement. One of the first EU countries to act was France, in 1986, when early retirement contracts were abolished. Soon after, similar actions were taken in Belgium, Germany, and the UK. However, the early retirement trend has developed its own momentum and has become institutionalized in the labor market for the reasons outlined above. Although the transition has happened, European societies are only just on the threshold of this third phase and, therefore, the future of aging and public policy is a matter of speculation. The future appears to offer two separate scenarios.
The first possibility is that aging will be regarded as a growing "burden" to society. In other words, ageing would be constituted, in policy terms, as an economic burden, and national governments would attempt to reduce its economic cost in the form of pensions and health and social services. There is no doubt that in several leading EU countries the cost of pensions and long-term care is a major political issue. Most of them have already taken action to limit costs. In the pensions field the most favored policy is an increase in retirement ages. For example, both Germany and the UK are increasing their retirement ages over the next decade.
This "public burden of aging" scenario would reinforce the continuous thread in postwar policy discourse that associates aging with inevitable decline, decrescence, and unproductiveness. According to this account, the future of old age would be a bleak one—particularly for those heavily reliant on the welfare state. In addition, the future of aging societies would be equally bleak because, if intergenerational solidarity is undermined by the policies that flow from the public burden orientation (such as the privatization of pensions and health and social care), this would have ramifications far beyond welfare policies.
The alternative path leads to active aging and age integration. Looking toward this future, there are three interlinked sets of developments suggesting that age may be reconstructed, or perhaps deconstructed, in a new post-modern form (Walker 1996).
First, in the labor market, there are clear signs of change in the perceptions of aging on the part of some European employers. There are a growing number of private companies in France, Germany, Sweden, and the UK that are adopting different employment practices to those followed by the majority. Examples include the introduction of more flexible employment and retirement policies, special recruitment campaigns targeted on older workers and, perhaps most importantly, new holistic approaches to employment and lifelong training, in which aging is a key factor built into considerations of job planning and design. Although these policies have been adopted by only a small minority of employers so far, there are indications to suggest the start of a trend. Moreover, some EU governments have been attempting to encourage flexibility in the form of partial retirement—although with little success so far.
Second, in the field of health and social services there are signs, in some EU countries, of a swing away from the traditional paternalism of service providers toward more active conceptions of old age. Over the last decade there has been a wide range of service innovations in the EU countries, despite funding shortages. Although traditional forms of service provision remain dominant and pluralistic service innovation has been haphazard, there are sufficient indications of change to suggest that practitioners are beginning to face up to the challenges of involving older users of services in key decisions about the provision of their care. Some are developing new strategies designed to empower older people to some extent, and professional attitudes and values are beginning to encourage cooperation and partnership with older service users. In short, what appears to be a gradual revolution is underway in the approach to aging taken by some social service agencies. If this change is successful on a large scale, it may transform the meaning of aging in this sphere from its association with passivity and dependency to one concerned with activity and interdependence. This sort of development would represent a profound shift in the social status of older people.
Third, older Europeans themselves are beginning to seize the initiative and may not be prepared to wait for the pronouncements of experts on how the aging process should be interpreted. A growing number are actively demonstrating the potential for a new meaning to be applied to aging. Thus, in recent years, new political groupings composed of older people have been formed, or existing ones have gained in strength, including the creation of pensioners' political parties. In Germany a "gray party" was formed in 1989 to champion senior citizens' interests. Belgium saw the founding of a pensioners' party in 1990; Italy has one and so does Portugal. There is a radical grassroots movement of older people in Denmark, an organization called Ageing Differently in The Netherlands (designed to campaign for alternative perceptions of old age) and, in the UK, the National Pensioners' Convention—a grassroots organization with up to 2 million members. The growth of self-advocacy movements among older people has been echoed in some countries by the creation of local or national advisory councils comprising older people (Walker & Naegele, 1999). These developments are finding support among the general public: More than four out of five EU citizens think that older people should stand up more actively for their rights (Walker 1993). There are indications in such evidence that the public thinks that aging should not be a simple matter of adjustment and peaceful retirement but that older people should be fully integrated citizens.
Together, these three developments suggest that, in the next century, the meaning of old age may be reconstructed into a more active form—where "activity" includes not only economic activity in the form of paid employment, but also a wide range of formal, quasiformal, and informal activities that are productive in social, political, and economic terms. To the extent that such activities are economically productive they would also assist in quelling the fears of politicians concerning the costs of aging societies. On the negative side, however, it is likely that the deconstruction of the later life course, in the absence of supportive social policies, would leave older people vulnerable, without rights to social protection and with access only to minimum social assistance level benefits and services.
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Policy Is Personal |
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Here the European evidence shows continuing high levels of social integration between age groups, for example, with regard to social contact or intergenerational solidarity. Within families women can be demonstrated to be the main facilitators of age integration. But here too policy plays a critical role: For example, by rationing social care the state ensures the continuing primacy of family care (in all but the Scandinavian countries). However, while this policy successfully maintained age integration (if not gender integration) in the modern era, the combination of changes in family structure and increased longevity implies that it will no longer suffice. Indeed, if additional social support is not provided, particularly in the southern states of Europe, this policy is likely to increase age segregation. In other words, policy may enhance the integration of older people in informal relationships or it may jeopardize it.
Conclusion
This essay has concentrated on the role of social policies, at both macro and micro levels, in the construction of age in postwar Europe. Thus, the increased age structuration and the segregation of old age experienced in the EU (especially in the northern countries) was a function of social policy. However, the outcomes of these policies were not always foreseen by their sponsors. The future offers possibilities for either greater age segregation or integration.
Received for publication May 13, 1999. Accepted for publication December 28, 1999.
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